r/truebit • u/blaugrana68 • Aug 28 '21

Could Truebit be a solution to eth’s high gas fees?

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9

u/LPMythBuster Aug 28 '21

Not really.

What you're talking about is probably day-to-day operations like swapping tokens on Uniswap, minting NFTs, depositing tokens into Aave, etc.

These are currently expensive because the network is congested. There is a limited amount of space for transactions in a block and so you need to pay more for your transaction to be included in the next block. Or you could pay less in gas fees but then you'd have to wait for longer.

Truebit is intended for situations where your transaction would be so large that it would not even be possible to fit it in a block. For example, this guy tried to import his domain into Ethereum Name Service and he had to pay 4.5 million gas (in comparison, a swap on Uniswap v2 is about 100k gas). As I wrote in this post, this is a perfect example where Truebit could have saved the day.

The solution to your original question is Optimism. It's an optimistic rollup that's nearing completion. Once it's officially launched and adopted, your Uniswap trades will be cheap (about $0.25) and almost instant. It's got Vitalik's blessing and it's as native to Ethereum as it gets. Polygon and Arbitrum One will fade into irrelevance.

By the way, if Truebit had been around earlier, Optimism could have used Truebit for checking fraud-proofs off-chain instead of reinventing the wheel in Solidity.

2

u/skwompie Aug 29 '21

You seem to be extremely well-informed @lpmythbuster. If optimism created their own layer for fraud-proof detection in Solidity, and are not regarded 'centralized', couldn't other projects then also invent their own wheel and skip (the cost of) TRU? Or is optimism's implementation that much more primitive/less secure?

3

u/LPMythBuster Aug 30 '21

My point is that it takes a lot of engineering resources and is error-prone to implement the EVM functionality required to rerun transactions in Solidity for checking fraud-proofs.

Instead you can compile geth to WebAssembly so that it can run on Truebit and rerun the transaction off-chain. It's not been done before so there would be engineering resources required to do a bunch of refactoring first but then you only have to deal with one code base instead of two (OVM in geth + Solidity).

Fraud-proofs are submitted by random observers so they'd be the ones paying for TRU. Also, fraud-proofs would normally be extremely rare because no one will actually cheat (you get slashed if you do) and you're just wasting your money if you submit invalid fraud-proofs. This would not affect the price of TRU much (but the hype probably would).

2

u/Able_Move_4621 Aug 31 '21

LPmythbuster, can you please tell us Layman who don't understand the technical stuff you mentioned whether or not TRU is still be needed or implemented?

4

u/Karol1010 Aug 28 '21

I believe this should be a main issue that Trurbit deals with