On Wednesday morning, the website Ethscriptions created a way to engrave an inscription on EIP-4844 BLOB, a cost-cutting data packet introduced in Ethereum's recent Dencun upgrade.
Like other blockchains that have undergone the stamping process, the so-called BlobScription has significantly boosted the price of blockspace (in this case, blobspace).
Since Dencun, the base fee for a BLOB, or the minimum gas price required to include a BLOB in the next Ethereum block, has been 1-way (an Ethereum-denominated price equivalent to a fraction of $0.01).
read more: Largest Ethereum upgrade in history goes live
According to Ultrasound.money, the base price of BLOB today exceeded Gwei 500. 1 Gwei is worth 1 billion Way.
At the time of this writing, the BLOB fee is approximately 6 Gwei, an increase of 60 trillion percent over the 1-way Blob cost in the two weeks since Dencun. According to CoinBrain, 6 Gwei is equivalent to approximately $0.20.
Notably, the significantly increased blob fee is still lower than Ethereum's layer 1 gas price, which is approximately 37 Gwei per Etherscan.
Nevertheless, the one-way price effectively makes blob space “free,” Blocknative CEO Matt Cutler told Blockworks via text. “However, his current BLOB base fee is measured in Gwei, which is far from free.”
Inscription, which has seen a resurgence in Bitcoin's popularity in recent months, creates an inexpensive way to embed art and potential tokens onto the blockchain. In the case of BlobScriptions, a large number of images and tokens are currently being written to his blob.
However, an important thing to note is that blob data is only retained by Ethereum nodes for approximately 18 days to allow layer 2 to validate transactions. Therefore, after 18 days, BlobScriptions will disappear from Ethereum. However, co-founder Tom Lehman said on X that BlobScriptions will continue to be stored in the creator protocol Ethscriptions indexer.
read more: What does EIP 4844 mean for Ethereum Rollup?
According to the Dune dashboard, in the four hours leading up to press time, 41% of blobs created were inscription mints. As a comparison, the popular layer 2 Arbitrum, Base, and Optimism each accounted for about 9% of his blobs over the same period.
Lehman told Blockworks that the purpose of using blobs for inscriptions is to allow people to move away from using expensive smart contracts for data storage.
“We created Blobscriptions to help the general public, not just the giant Layer 2, benefit from EIP-4844 blobs,” Lehman said in a direct message.
On Wednesday afternoon, Ethereum also saw an increase in missing slots, although researchers disagree as to whether the missing slots were due to the blob inscription or something else. was there.
In any case, the Blob inscription could prevent the low-cost Promised Land that Layer 2 has been living in for the past two weeks.
“[Is] Is this a fad or a long-lasting habit? Only time will tell,” Cutler wrote.
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