The Cost of Legacy Architecture in a High-Gas Environment

First-price auctions for block space create a volatile, user-hostile fee market. Users overpay to outbid bots, while predictable dApp costs are impossible.

• Median gas price spikes of 1000%+ during mempool congestion.
• ~$2B in MEV extracted annually from users via front-running and sandwich attacks.
• Developer churn as unpredictable costs kill product economics.

Shift from transaction specification to outcome declaration. Users state what they want, not how to do it, enabling off-chain solvers (like UniswapX and CowSwap) to compete for optimal execution.

• Cost reduction of 20-60% via solver competition and MEV recapture.
• Gasless UX where users sign intents, not gas-heavy transactions.
• Composable liquidity across chains via protocols like Across and LayerZero.

Sequencing, execution, and consensus on a single node creates a linear scaling bottleneck. Every validator replays every transaction, capping throughput at ~10-100 TPS for major L1s.

• High base cost for simple transfers due to global state bloat.
• Zero parallelization limits DeFi composability and gaming applications.
• Hard forks required for fundamental upgrades, slowing innovation.

Decouple execution layers (EVM, SVM, MoveVM) from consensus and data availability. Enable parallel transaction processing via architectures like Monad, Sei, and Fuel.

• Theoretical 10,000+ TPS by sharding execution.
• ~90% lower fees for users through dedicated throughput.
• Specialized chains (DeFi, Gaming, Social) via rollup frameworks like Arbitrum Orbit and OP Stack.

Every node must store and compute the entire chain history, creating prohibitive hardware requirements and slow sync times. This centralizes nodes and kills lightweight clients.

• Ethereum full node requires ~2TB+ of storage and growing.
• Days to weeks for chain synchronization, a barrier for new validators.
• No viable mobile clients for true self-custody.

Leverage cryptographic proofs (ZK-SNARKs, STARKs) to verify state transitions without holding full state. Clients need only the latest block header and a validity proof.

• Near-instant sync from genesis using proofs from protocols like Succinct.
• Constant-sized verification enables true light clients and mobile wallets.
• Enhanced security via mathematical verification, reducing trust assumptions.

Legacy architectures process all logic on-chain, paying the gas price for every computation. This creates a direct, unavoidable tax on user activity and protocol revenue.\n- On-chain order matching burns fees for failed transactions.\n- Monolithic execution prevents cost isolation, making simple functions expensive.

When network demand spikes, legacy systems cannot scale, leading to failed transactions and seized operations. This isn't just slow—it's a breakdown of core functionality.\n- Non-competitive UX: Users abandon transactions due to $100+ gas fees.\n- Arbitrage inefficiency: MEV bots dominate, extracting value from users and LPs.

While you're optimizing for 5% gas savings, new entrants using Solana, Arbitrum, or Optimism with native low-cost architectures are capturing the next wave of users and developers.\n- Developer migration: Talent builds where costs are predictable.\n- TVL drainage: Capital flows to chains where yield isn't eroded by fees.

Maintaining security for a monolithic, high-value contract on a congested chain is exponentially more expensive and risky. Every audit and upgrade carries massive potential liability.\n- Audit costs scale with complexity: $500k+ for a full protocol review.\n- Upgrade risks are systemic: A bug can freeze $1B+ TVL.

Publishing all transaction data directly to L1 (Ethereum) is the gold standard for security but creates a $0.10-$1.00+ per transaction cost floor. Competitors using Celestia, EigenDA, or Avail achieve similar security for >90% less.\n- Paying for prestige: You subsidize Ethereum's security budget.\n- Inflexible scaling: Your cost structure is pegged to L1 gas auctions.

High, unpredictable costs break the "money Lego" model. Protocols cannot assume cheap, reliable calls between contracts, leading to isolated, fragile ecosystems. This kills the network effect that made Ethereum dominant.\n- DeFi pipelines fail: Multi-step transactions become economically non-viable.\n- Innovation stifled: New primitives like ERC-4337 account abstraction are too expensive to use at scale.

Every node stores the entire state, forcing users to pay for storage they don't use. This creates a quadratic scaling problem where network growth directly inflates costs for all participants.\n- Gas costs become dominated by state access, not computation.\n- Node requirements skyrocket, killing decentralization.

Offload execution to specialized layers (Rollups) and settle proofs on a shared data availability layer like Celestia or EigenDA. This decouples transaction throughput from base-layer congestion.\n- Costs scale with usage, not total network size.\n- Enables parallel execution and custom VMs (Fuel, Eclipse).

Legacy dApps demand atomic, same-block composability, forcing all logic onto one congested chain. This creates a winner-take-all gas market where DeFi arbitrage bots outbid normal users.\n- User transactions fail during peak demand.\n- Innovation is stifled by high fixed costs.

Shift from transaction-based to outcome-based (intent) models. Let solvers (like in UniswapX or CowSwap) compete off-chain and settle optimistically.\n- Users get guaranteed rates, not gas auctions.\n- Cross-chain actions become native via protocols like Across and LayerZero.

Publishing all transaction data on-chain (e.g., Ethereum calldata) is a massive, fixed cost. It's the primary bottleneck for rollup scalability and cost reduction.\n- ~80% of rollup cost is L1 data fees.\n- Creates a hard ceiling on TPS.

Adopt a modular stack with optional data availability. Validiums and Volitions (from StarkEx) let apps choose between secure on-chain DA or low-cost off-chain DA.\n- Reduce costs by 100x for non-financial apps.\n- Maintain security for high-value transactions.