Author: Tom Mitchelhill, CoinTelegraph; Compilation: Wu Zhu, Golden Finance
A frenzy of airdrop requests from a new Ethereum second-layer network called Scroll briefly drove blob fee costs up to $4.52, marking the third time blobs became expensive since the March Ethereum Dencun upgrade.
Anonymous crypto data analyst Hildobby stated in a post on X on October 22, 'The Scroll airdrop claims just triggered the blob market; they are no longer free.'
He attributed the rise in blob fees to the airdrop of Ethereum L2 Scroll, which listed its governance token SCR on Binance and airdropped tokens to its users on October 22.
Source: Hildobby
According to Dune Analytics, on October 22, blob fees reached a four-month high of $4.52.
The significant rise in blob prices had only occurred twice before—once during the surge of L2 activity in July and once during the release of Blobscriptions on March 27, which is a protocol that allows users to write data directly into blobs.
Increasing blob fees is a double-edged sword for Ethereum. More expensive blobs result in more blob gas being paid to the network; however, they also raise the associated costs of executing transactions and transfers on Ethereum L2s.
On October 22, blob fees peaked at $4.52. Source: Dune Analytics
Notably, as L2 activity slowed, blob fee prices quickly dropped, with costs nearing zero at the time of publication.
Just a month ago, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin emphasized this in a speech in September. The 'blob count' (the maximum number of available blobs per block) is nearing full capacity, and if measures are not taken to address this issue, it could soon hinder Ethereum's scalability.
Weeks later, on October 18, Ethereum developers unveiled a new Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) aimed at increasing the current fixed 'blob number'—the maximum number of blobs available per block.
Christine Kim, Vice President of Research at Galaxy Digital, stated that EIP-7742 will create a mechanism for Ethereum's consensus layer to 'dynamically' set blob gas targets and maxima, enhancing network scalability in the upcoming Pectra upgrade.
Blobs were introduced as part of the Ethereum Dencun upgrade in March, primarily aimed at reducing transaction costs on Ethereum L2 networks.
With the introduction of blobs and original danksharding, transaction fees on Ethereum L2 have significantly decreased. Arbitrum's swap fees plummeted from around $1.25 to below $0.02, while Polygon fees also dropped by a similar amount.
Notably, Ethereum developer Dan Cline spent only $14 to write the entire Bee Movie script to the Ethereum mainnet, showcasing the cost-saving capabilities of blobs as temporary data storage units.
