Quick take:
The Ethereum community has crowdfunded 43 ETH and $16,827 in DAI towards the development and possible implementation of EIP1559. The latter is an Ethereum Improvement Proposal that aims at solving the issue of high transaction fees brought about by network congestion as well as in cases where the sender erroneously inputs a larger than usual fee to process an Ethereum transaction.
The community fund is available via Gitcoin.co and provides an Ethereum address where any ETH based token can be sent. At the time of writing this, members of the Ethereum community have contributed the following digital assets.
Senior Ethereum developer, Eric Conner, has contributed $2,500 towards the EIP’s Gitcoin Grant.
The drive to fund the development of EIP1559 comes only weeks after three Ethereum transactions on the 10th and 11th of June, shocked the crypto-verse due to the amount in fees paid by the sender.
In the first transaction, the sender spent 10,668 ETH ($2.6M) to send 0.55 Ethereum. For the second transaction, the same sender spent another 10,668 ETH to send 350 Ethereum. For the third transaction, a different sender spent 2,310 ETH ($530k) to send 3,221 Ethereum.
Due to the enormity of the fees in the first two transactions, Ethereum miners had reached out in a bid to solve the issue on the assumption that the high fees were inputted by mistake. However, when the sender did not reach out, the ETH fees worth over $5 million was distributed amongst miners. It would later surface that the transactions were by hackers who had gained partial control over an Ethereum wallet and were sending the transactions as a form of ransom.
EIP1559 aims at replacing the current fee model with a mechanism that adjusts a base network fee according to the network demand. Furthermore, the Ethereum Improvement Proposal suggests that the BASEFEE to be decided by the protocol, and will be destroyed during each transaction. Miners will be incentivized separately using a GAS-PREMIUM. Ethereum users can additionally determine how high of a fee they will pay using a FEECAP.