Just a few weeks ago, the Ethereum blockchain underwent a revolutionary upgrade that created a specific area for storing data, or “blobs,” with the goal of lowering fees and easing congestion.However, a new project has already emerged to congest the so-called blob sector, driving increasing fees and posing the first significant stress test for the nascent blob market.
Following the creation of a new method for minting inscriptions on data blobs, or “blobscriptions,” by a project named Ethscriptions, Ethereum gas fees for blobs increased on Wednesday.The Dune Analytics dashboard indicates that on Wednesday, the blob base charge increased to a minimum of 582 gwei ($266).The blob base charge was dropped to about 18 gwei ($8.69) as of Thursday’s posting.
“As widely predicted, it looks like March 27, 2024, will be remembered as the day that the ‘blobs are free EIP-4844 launch discount’ party came to a close – courtesy of Blob Inscriptions,” Matt Cutler, the CEO of Blocknative, wrote on X.
The proposal that introduced the new blob market is known as EIP-4844. It was integrated into Ethereum’s historic Dencun update, which was finished on March 13.The several layer-2 networks developed on top of Ethereum, such as Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, and Coinbase’s Base, depend heavily on the blob space to execute transactions more swiftly and affordably than is feasible on the main chain.Reams of data must be parked on Ethereum by the layer 2s as part of the process, which significantly increases their overall prices.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin admitted in a blog post on Thursday that the Blobscriptions incident had forced the new blob-fee market into “price discovery mode,” but he also noted that the data fees were still significantly lower than they would have been under the previous arrangement, which involved parking data as “calldata” in a typical Ethereum transaction.
“Blobs are not free, but they remain much cheaper than calldata,” Buterin wrote. “From here, important scaling work, both in increasing blob count and in improving rollups’ ability to make the best use of each blob, will continue to take place, but it will be more incremental.”