Request for Base Fee Decrease on Testnet

MIPs
1

Problem: Currently on Monad testnet, the base fee is set quite high relative to the median balance level of MON tokens that users hold. This has lead many app developers building on testnet to be extremely gas-conscious with their design decisions.

While we believe that gas efficiency should always be a design goal for all apps, unfortunately the BASE_FEE (currently at 50 GWEI) is too high relative to the median user’s balance to accurately simulate what mainnet conditions will be like (presumably with cheap, abundant blockspace!)

E.G., My own team has been forced to make design decisions with demos and games that improve UX (such as gas abstraction, automation, etc) that are too gas-intensive to be repeated multiple times by the average user, but which on Mainnet will presumably have an aggregate cost of fractions of a fraction of a penny.

“The app uses too much gas!” should not be the main feedback that any reasonably-built project hears from their users.. yet it’s what we hear the most from our demo. Because gas costs are relative to balances (which are fountain-level low for most users), it is the #1 thing that we hear. This has lead to internal conversations around reducing on-chain compute by adding offchain infra for calculations (adding latency and therefore worsening UX) in order to reduce on-chain gas cost.

I do not believe that this is a design constraint that devs building on Monad should be incentivized to build inside of… but because testnet user adoption is a signal for app success and because user’s are gas-sensitive on testnet, there is an incentive for apps to reduce the complexity and scope of what they’re building and focus on the local maxima (winning testnet) rather than the global maxima (having the best app on mainnet).

Proposal:
Set the BASE_FEE of Monad Testnet to 5 GWEI - a 90% reduction.

5 Likes
2

I agree on this, I make fully onchain CLOB, and I just added ccxt interface on smart contract and maker/taker fee module recently. The code is more complex, and I need less gas fee.

4 Likes
3

I just don t get one thing in testnet. when a transaction fail. it cost me more than 2.5 MON

2 Likes
4

The current decision to fix basefee on testnet to 50 Monad-gwei (i.e. 50 * 10^-9 MON) was made based on the calculation that transfer costs 0.001 MON. This is a tiny cost based on a total supply of 100B MON.

With that said, basefee will become dynamic on testnet shortly. We’ll keep this thread updated as that gets closer.

2 Likes
5

I think that for mainnet this would great, but on Testnet most users are interacting with the chain via MON they got from a fountain, which is currently emitting 0.5 MON. If we cannot reduce the base fee, could we increase the amount of MON that is being emitted from the fountain in order to create a more realistic cost environment?

2 Likes