Importance of Setting Gas Price on the BandChain

BCIP-10: Introduce minimum gas price of 0.0025 uband

Our latest and monumental upgrade to the BandChain has brought about massive improvements to the user experience that culminated to a much faster network which promises an increase in throughput by at least 10X. The fundamental improvements that were made to the BandChain have not only allowed the network to function more efficiently but have also opened up the opportunity for the Band ecosystem to move closer towards one of our goals, which is to operate and contribute to Web3 in the most decentralized manner. Let us now run through our latest proposal and explain why and how this latest gas proposal on the BandChain will be beneficial for the entire Band ecosystem.

Proposal

The team has suggested that we introduce network fees on the BandChain mainnet as we strongly suggest validators to set the minimum gas price at 0.0025 uband. This change aims to achieve the following objectives:

• Prevent spam events on the BandChain
• Provide incentive for actors to be good actors within the Band community (e.g. validators and data providers to be rewarded for completed work)
• Progress towards a self-sustainable decentralized ecosystem

How is this beneficial?

Having made significant improvements to the throughput of the BandChain from the latest 2.4 upgrade, the next top-of-mind task in the pursuit to improve security of the BandChain is to introduce gas fees to prevent spam transactions on the BandChain. This minimum gas price, set to 0.0025 uband, came as a result of experimentation and testing that aims to adequately discourage attacks and network spamming whilst simultaneously operating efficiently with no hindrance to the services on the network.

Implementing this proposal will also allow the Band ecosystem to naturally govern and reward the various actors within the Band community by rewarding these transaction fees to those who positively contribute to the network. Essentially, this proposal not only creates greater emphasis on the value of contributing to the network, but also inherently promotes greater value to the Band token that governs the Band ecosystem.

Last but not least, implementing this proposal will help to drive our network and community to achieve the goal of a self-sustainable decentralized ecosystem.

Consequence of not implementing minimal gas fees

Given the scenario that only some validators choose to implement minimum gas, validators could potentially earn less rewards from transactions on the network given the absence of gas. Therefore, this will impact the innate ability of the BandChain to automatically reward validators who positively contribute to the network. Furthermore, failing to introduce gas could impose potential risk from malicious actors on the network to congest the network with spam transactions that create no positive intrinsic value to the network.

Efforts to achieve the long-term goal of a self-sustainable decentralized ecosystem will arguably be greatly hampered if we fail to implement this proposal as it aims to automatically create value and reward the participants in a manner that also promotes the utility of the Band token.

When?

The deadline for voting this proposal is on the 27th of January and, if the proposal passes, foundation nodes will set a minimum gas price of each node to 0.0025 uband, starting from the 1st of February 2023.