One of the last major Tier 2s converted their call data to blobs last week.
Blast is a relatively new bullish rollup, but initially received a lot of attention for supporting base yield. The mainnet launched in February, but early access began in November 2023, allowing users to make deposits but not withdrawals. However, by linking earned Blast Points, the platform was able to naturally accumulate over $1 billion in total value locked in prior to launch. There was also criticism of the invitation compensation structure, which was widely suspected of being a ‘Ponzi scheme’.
However, Blast is now available to the public. There are no airdrops yet, but it’s still Layer 2 gaining public attention by being backed by Paradigm, created by the founders of NFT marketplace Blur, and of course offering profit opportunities.
It is also home to Fantasy.top, one of the trendiest cryptocurrency protocols that allows users to trade cryptocurrency influencer trading cards. Although revenue slowed earlier this month, it ranked among the top 10 platforms in terms of daily commissions generated.
In terms of activity, Blast is still not as popular as Arbitrum. Since it launched when Base was enjoying its second wave of popularity, it also lagged behind the Coinbase-backed bullish rollup. Daily transaction levels are typically consistent with Optimism at around 500,000 per day, which is still impressive for a modern network.
However, it was beneficial for all layer 2s to start using blobs for their call data to publish transaction summaries, as they provide a much cheaper means of storing data regardless of usage. Blast’s fees weren’t very high after the initial ads disappeared, and Rollup’s median transaction fees generally stayed below $0.10 for a few days until the Blob upgrade on May 27.
Since the switch, median transaction fees have not exceeded $0.01, making Blast one of the cheapest Layer 2s available.
Blast publishes a significant number of blobs, trending between 700 and 1,000 per day, falling behind Aribtrum, Base, Optimism, Taiko, and Scroll, but ahead of Linea and other ZK rollup networks.
However, Blast only publishes one blob per transaction, making it the third most dominant network in terms of blob transactions published to the Ethereum mainnet. In this transaction, we can see that Blast published only one blob, while Optimism published six in this transaction. It is more cost-effective to publish more blobs within a transaction to reduce transaction fees, and it is common to see some of the larger rollups using up to 6 blobs per transaction. The newly released Taiko and Scroll also appear to use one blob per transaction for now.
This may be a temporary setup as Blast coordinates publishing blob transactions before batching more blobs together, but it seems like Blast is already passing on very low fees to users without any bundling.
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