Signal Proposal: Burn Fee + Min Fee Param Addition
This proposal is designed to assess community interest in two critical changes: implementing a burn fee procedure and setting transaction fees as an on-chain parameter for the Secret Network.
Overview
At present, the transaction fees on Secret Network are relatively low, thereby simplifying the onboarding of new users. Yet over the last several months, Secret Saturn has made the fee grant module popular on secret, demonstrating to DApp builders that they can create easy onboarding for users without existing Secret holdings, if desired. This trend has subsequently been followed by the Shade platform.
However, the low transaction fees have inadvertently exposed the network to affordable DDOS attacks. These attacks, perpetrated by both arbitrage bots and other actors with no discernable positive intentions, are known to degrade network quality. This issue has been occurring for some time now and is not unique to secret.
Proposal
We suggest adding an on-chain parameter that allows for proposals to alter the minimum gas fees on the Secret Network, with a default option that can be changed to exclude fees for relayed transactions as this seems standard to do at this time. Currently, fees are directed towards validators and set manually per node. This proposal also recommends that these fees be automatically burned at the protocol level, rather than being allocated to validators.
Pairing a minimum gas fee parameter with a fee burn mechanism would imply that Secret usage incurs a meaningful cost in SCRT determined by governance that gets burned, thereby reducing the overall supply. While acknowledging that this would not outpace inflation at the present time, It provides additional levers for governance to utilize for achieving desired outcomes. This represents a multi-pronged approach to network management and growth, but it does not suggest any specific minimum fee only adding the parameters to the chain.
Voting Yes on this proposal means you’d like to see these features added in a network upgrade by SCRT Labs.
Voting No on this proposals means you would not like to see these features added in a network upgrade by SCRT Labs.
References
Example of minimum gas parameter activation from Osmosis: Osmosis Proposal
Example EIP-1559: Fee market change for ETH 1.0 chain: EIP-1559
if done id like to see relayer Txs to be excluded similar to how juno does this.
Although i think a burn would be cool a yes/no for me on this would be dependent on if/how inflation changes with the other proposals. If inflation is lowered I would favour dispersing TX fee revenue over burning it as it widens the staking vs non-staking APR gap meaning it accomodates lower inflation systems.
Agree on making this burn vs disperse a parameter though.
Good feedback, you explained elsewhere that this is the standard and that the relayer fee middleware isn’t really supported in enough wallets and such yet even though its an option for our network. Will update to include this.
Agree a burn mechanism on the usage does help, albeit little for now but the goal should be to increase fees by a certain measure for users who want access to privacy. This will help bring usage and demand (Be it from bots or users) to burn SCRT and contribute towards positive economic growth of the protocol.
Since all feedback here, in telegram channels, and 1 on 1 conversations were overall supportive of this and all brought up concerns were addressed, this proposal is now in the deposit phase on mainnet.
Support, but on the other hand there should be system of limited gas-less transactions for SCRT dapps for onboarding, for example 5K transactions for Shade every month, Shade would get to determine how it intends to distribute these gas-less transactions.
Minimum fee makes sense ( I’ve thought about proposing it a few times myself ), the current fees are ridiculously low
As for whether money should be burned instead of distributed to validators, I don’t think it’s a good idea, certainly not 100%
Burning all fees will lead to zero incentive to put transactions into blocks, this can be observed on Ethereum as part of MEV censorship, where simply because a user is willing to pay more does not fundamentally incentivize validators to choose non-censoring MEV builders
These fees already currently go to stakers / validators currently (even though in the text it says it goes to validators). Validators cannot censor transactions on tendermint chains AFAIK. This proposal suggests burning them instead. There is already inflation, I don’t know that people are convinced we need revenue from fees as well instead of simply burning them.
This wasn’t requested or suggested by any dapp that I’m aware of and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a fee exemption suggested or done on a chain, outside of the relay fee which makes some sense to do. Also remember, the chain itself would decide if it wants to actually adopt these features and what the values would be, this proposal intentionally excludes any values for fees.
I think after our conversation in the DMs we agree that the design as proposed is fine, but if we move forward there will have to be development of supporting solutions so that a good UX is maintained and at the same time applications don’t lose money on onboarding to the network.
While burning fees will not be a major step in reducing inflation it can potentially be good marketing
