Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has argued that crypto payments will once again make sense as transaction costs will soon fall to fractions of a cent due to layer-2 rollups.
The Cointelegraph team currently on the ground at Korea Blockchain Week (KBW) quoted Buterin as stating that the final hurdle to getting transactions down to fractions of a cent at scale is blockchain data compression.
He pointed to solid work happening with roll-ups at the moment such as Optimisms layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum, which has worked to get the size and cost of data in blockchain transactions down by introducing zero byte compression.
So today with roll-ups, transaction fees are generally somewhere between $0.25, sometimes $0.10, and in the future with roll-ups with all of the improvements to efficiency that I talked about. The transaction costs could go down to $0.05, or even maybe as low as $0.02. So much cheaper, much more affordable, and a complete game changer.
Despite primarily functioning as a speculative store of value, Buterin emphasized the key use case of Bitcoin (BTC) presented in its white paper from 2008 was to provide a peer-to-peer electronic cash system that was cheaper than traditional payment methods.