How Much Has the Ethereum Dencun Upgrade Cut Layer-2 Gas Fees?
The Dencun upgrade has made gas fees on many Ethereum layer-2 networks near-zero. But it has yet to peel users away from the costly mainnet.
Heralded by Ethereum developers as the technical milestone they’d been “dreaming of,” last week’s Dencun upgrade was supposed to forever alter the Ethereum ecosystem—by making transactions on its layer-2 networks exponentially cheaper and thus more accessible.
One week later, how do things stand?
On the whole, Dencun has delivered exactly as promised. Across layer-2 networks that have already integrated the software update, gas fees have plummeted to unprecedented lows, in most cases by over 90%.
At writing, median transaction fees on layer-2 networks Arbitrum, Starknet, Optimism, and Optimism-based chains Base and Zora have all fallen to one cent or below, according to data from Dune and Ethereum analytics platform Grow The Pie. That’s a 91% to 95% drop in cost for each of those networks.