How will Aptos improve the separation of storage and execution gas models?

Recently, the Aptos team announced plans to improve Gas fees in the coming months. This plan is divided into three phases:

1. In early January 2023, the Gas price for dynamic NFTs was reduced to one-tenth of the original.

2. In the first quarter of 2023, build an efficient Gas data structure to provide comprehensive support from guidelines to indexing.

3. At the end of the first quarter or the beginning of the second quarter of 2023, design a new Gas model that separates storage and execution costs, providing demand-driven Gas costs for execution.

Background Analysis

The Aptos team has engaged in in-depth discussions with multiple ecosystem projects and analyzed on-chain transaction data. They found that:

• The token transfer fee on Aptos is approximately 0.00055 APT.
• The gas fees for most DeFi operations range between 0.003 to 0.005 APT.
• Gas costs are mainly composed of execution above 50% of ( and project creation above 20% of ).

The current Gas policy bundles execution and storage costs together, which has caused some issues. Execution Gas limits the maximum execution time of transactions, while storage Gas determines the efficiency of using scarce resources. This bundling means that reducing costs for one side will affect the other.

Short-term Plan: Reduce Dynamic NFT Gas Fees

The team found that optimizing the SimpleMap implementation can immediately reduce the Gas fees of dynamic NFTs. By enforcing this, the Gas price can be lowered by more than 50%. The Aptos team is preparing to apply this update to the mainnet and release the first Aptos Improvement Proposal (AIP).

Mid-term Plan: Efficient Gas Data Structure

Many ecosystem projects have developed their own gas-efficient data structures. The Aptos team is also exploring this field, considering two factors: data size and application. They are developing SmartVector and SmartTree to provide more efficient data storage and querying solutions.

In addition, the team plans to restore support for BucketTable to achieve more efficient large-scale map-like storage. These improvements will be gradually rolled out through AIP, documentation, and index support.

Long-term Plan: Demand-driven Gas Costs

The current Gas framework combines execution fees and storage fees, leading to an imbalance in Gas prices. The storage pricing scheme also lacks the ability to reflect the data lifecycle and does not provide an incentive to delete data.

To address these issues, the Aptos team plans:

1. Separate storage and execution Gas fees, and reduce execution costs.
2. Provide a framework that supports the refund of storage fees.

The storage fee refund will be returned to the original account that made the payment for the data creation. In addition, the team is considering providing subsidies from the central account for specific operations ( such as creating NFTs or facilitating DeFi operations ).

After these improvements are completed, transactions such as moving or modifying NFTs, updating oracle data, and updating positions in DeFi operations will benefit from significantly reduced gas fees.