The recent spike in RAM costs on the EOS blockchain has caused new account creation costs to soar north of $10 per account at the time of this writing. Each account currently requires at least 4KB of RAM at $2.50 per KB. The RAM price is set by market participants as they buy and sell memory space for EOS. The supply of RAM is determined by the community via the elected block producers, but is limited by the availability of hardware. Currently, the EOS blockchain has been configured for a total of 64GB of RAM, of which 51GB have been purchased by users and speculators with less than 2% of it being used.

Step 1 — Increase RAM Supply

Block.one has released an update to the EOSIO system contract that enables block producers to specify a rate-of-increase for RAM. Every block new RAM will be added to the system which will lower the price given the same demand.

I recommend that the producers immediately start growing the RAM at the rate of 64GB per year (1 KB per block). With this new supply, the EOS blockchain will either take in over 23,000,000 EOS per-year by selling RAM at current prices or the price of RAM will fall.

If prices remain too high and/or testing reveals that we can sustain a faster growth rate, then this number can be adjusted as-needed by the community.

Step 2 — Lower Account Memory Usage

The default EOS blockchain hard-codes a RAM usage of 3 KB per account where 1.5 KB is currently reserved for future expansion. This was an overly conservative estimate. Upon closer auditing of actual RAM usage per account, we have concluded that only 512 bytes are required for each new account. Block.one will provide an update to the system contract that will create 1.5 KB of RAM per account and retroactively offset the overly conservative usage estimate. The end result will be to reduce the minimum account creation RAM requirements by almost 50%. We expect this update to be ready by July 31st.

Step 3 — Free Accounts with Block.one’s iOS Wallet

Block.one is building a free iOS hardware wallet using Apple’s Secure Enclave. At this time, I believe Block.one will be able to offer a free EOS account to unique users of our iOS wallet. This is subject to change depending upon market conditions. This free account can be used with any decentralized application that is compatible with Block.one’s wallet API.

Long term Roadmap

I am committed to scaling the EOSIO software in both transaction performance and RAM capacity. It is my goal to ensure that EOSIO remains the fastest, lowest latency, most scalable, and easiest to use blockchain platform on the market.