Ethereum blob fees soar: What does it mean for L2s?

A frenzy of airdrop claims for a new Ethereum layer-2 network called Scroll briefly drove up the cost of blob fees as high as $4.52, marking the third time that blobs have become costly since Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade in March. 

“Scroll airdrop claimers just triggered the blob market, they’re no longer free,” said pseudonymous crypto data analyst Hildobby in an Oct. 22 post to X. 

He blamed the uptick in blob fees on an airdrop for Ethereum L2 Scroll, which listed its governance token SCR on Binance and airdropped the token to its users on Oct. 22. 

According to data from Dune Analytics, blob fees reached a four-month high of $4.52 on Oct. 22.

A massive uptick in blob price has only been witnessed twice before — once during a surge in L2 activity in July and earlier during the launch of Blobscriptions on March 27, a protocol that allowed users to inscribe data directly onto blobs. 

Heightened blob fees are a double-edged sword for Ethereum. More expensive blobs result in higher sums of blob gas being paid back to the network; however, they also drive up costs associated with executing transactions and transfers on Ethereum L2s.

Notably, the price of blob fees retraced rapidly as activity across L2s slowed, settling down to a cost of near zero at the time of publication. 

It comes just a month after Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stressed in a Sept. 27 X thread that the “blob count” — the maximum amount of available blobs per block — was nearing full capacity and could soon stall scalability for Ethereum if measures were not taken to address it.

Weeks later, on Oct. 18, Ethereum developers revealed a new Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) aimed at increasing the currently fixed “blob count”—the maximum number of available blobs per block. 

According to Galaxy Digital’s vice president of research, Christine Kim, EIP-7742 will create a mechanism for the Ethereum consensus layer to “dynamically” set the blob gas target and max values, optimizing for blob-carrying transactions and improve network scalability in the upcoming Pectra fork.

Related: Raydium beats Ethereum in 24-hour fee revenues

Blobs were introduced as part of Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade in March — an improvement that was focused primarily on reducing transaction costs on Ethereum’s layer-2 networks. 

Following the introduction of blobs and proto-danksharding, transaction fees on Ethereum L2 fell drastically. Swap fees on Arbitrum plunged from around $1.25 to below $0.02, while Polygon fees dropped by a similar amount.

Notably, Ethereum developer Dan Cline inscribed the entire Bee Movie script to the Ethereum mainnet for just $14, demonstrating the cost-saving capabilities of blobs as temporary data storage units. 

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