Yesterday’s Dencun upgrade on Ethereum appears to have delivered on its promise of lowering transaction fees on Layer 2s.
Large Layer 2 chains that have implemented blobs have seen their average transaction costs drop dramatically.
For the uninitiated, the upgrade provided Layer 2s with a new transaction type called blobs. These blobs serve as a new location point for the chains when posting information on Ethereum, instead of the traditional ‘call data’ method, and provide a direct path to rate reduction.
Data from Layer 2s, such as in the Optimism ecosystem, which includes OP Mainnet, Base, and Zora, as well as others like zkSync and Starknet, all indicate a decline in transaction costs by various folds.
For example, average gas costs on Base have fallen from around $0.5 on March 13 (right before Dencun went live) to around $0.0012, according to the latest on-chain data collected by Marcov on Dune. Meanwhile, the average cost on Base is $0.06. Similar figures apply to OP Mainnet, which, like Base, is also part of the Optimism ecosystem.
Median transaction costs for Layer 2s | Source: Dune (via Marcov)
Reductions in fees were also observed on Starknet. Argent, one of the largest wallet providers on the network, noted on
Meanwhile, the most widely used Layer 2, Arbitrum One, has yet to be integrated with Dencun improvements. It plans to launch its ArbOS upgrade later today, introducing blob support for Arbitrum rollup chains.
More than 3000 blobs have been used so far. It is expected that Layer 2 chains using blobs may incur higher costs 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.
