A frenzy of airdrop applications for a new Ethereum Layer 2 network called Scroll pushed the price of BLOBs up to $4.52 at one point, marking the third time that BLOBs have become more expensive since Ethereum's Dencun upgrade in March. .
“Scroll airdrop claims just caused a blob market and it’s no longer free,” pseudonymous crypto data analyst Hildby said in an Oct. 22 post on X.
He blamed the rise in Blob fees on the Ethereum L2 scroll airdrop. Ethereum L2 Scroll listed its governance token SCR on Binance and airdropped the token to users on October 22nd.
Blob fees reached a four-month high of $4.52 on October 22, according to data from Dune Analytics.
Significant increases in BLOB prices have only been witnessed twice so far. The first time was during a spike in L2 activity in July, and again before that when Blobscriptions started on March 27th. Blobscriptions is a protocol that allows users to write data directly to BLOBs.
Rising blob fees are a double-edged sword for Ethereum. The more expensive the blob, the more blob gas will be paid to the network. However, it also increases the costs associated with performing transactions and transfers on Ethereum L2.
In particular, as overall L2 activity slowed, the price of blob fees quickly rebounded, settling at near-zero cost at the time of publication.
This is what Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin wrote in an X thread on September 27th that the “blob count” (the maximum amount of blobs available per block) is nearing full capacity, and countermeasures are being taken. This comes just a month after Ethereum highlighted that it could quickly stall Ethereum's scalability if taken. No steps have been taken to address it.
A few weeks later, on October 18th, Ethereum developers released a new Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) aimed at increasing the currently fixed “blob count” (the maximum number of blobs available per block). Announced.
According to Christine Kim, vice president of research at Galaxy Digital, EIP-7742 creates a mechanism for the Ethereum consensus layer to “dynamically” set targets and maximums for blob gas, optimizing transactions that carry blobs, and This will improve the scalability of future networks. Pectra fork.
BLOBs were introduced as part of Ethereum's Dencun upgrade in March. This improvement was primarily focused on reducing transaction costs on Ethereum's Layer 2 network.
After the introduction of BLOB and Protodunk Sharding, Ethereum L2 transaction fees have dropped significantly. Arbitrum's swap fees plummeted from about $1.25 to less than $0.02, and Polygon's fees fell by a similar amount.
Notably, Ethereum developer Dan Klein submitted the entire Bee Movie script to the Ethereum mainnet for just $14, demonstrating the cost-saving capabilities of BLOBs as temporary data storage units.
