Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade yesterday appears to have delivered on its promise of reducing transaction costs at Layer 2.
Major Layer 2 chains that have implemented Blob have seen dramatic reductions in average transaction fees.
For the uninitiated, the upgrade brought a new transaction type to layer 2 called blob. These blobs act as new location points on the chain when posting information to Ethereum instead of the traditional “call data” method and provide a direct path to reduced fees.
Data from the Optimism ecosystem, including OP Mainnet, Base, and Zora, as well as layer 2s such as zkSync and Starknet, all indicate that transaction fees have decreased by several orders of magnitude.
For example, according to the latest on-chain data compiled by Marcov from Dune, Base’s median gas fee fell from about $0.50 on March 13 (just before Dencun launched) to about $0.0012. Meanwhile, Base’s average fee is $0.06. Similar figures apply to OP Mainnet, which, like Base, is part of the Optimism ecosystem.
Intermediate transaction fees across Layer 2 | Source: Dune (via Marcov)
A reduction in fees was also observed on Starknet. Argent, one of the largest wallet providers on the network, famous The average swap fee for Starknet on
Meanwhile, Arbitrum One, the most widely used Layer 2, has not yet been integrated with the Dencun enhancements. We plan to launch an ArbOS upgrade later today, introducing Blob support to the Arbitrum rollup chain.
More than 3000 blobs have been used so far. Layer 2 chains utilizing Blobs are expected to experience higher fees in the future. As the number of rollups using blobs increases, competition for blob space is expected to increase, leading to slightly higher transaction costs.
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