According to PANews, the market consensus is that after the Cancun upgrade, Ethereum L2's average gas fees will decrease by 10 times or more. Following the deployment of the core protocol EIP4844 in the Cancun upgrade, the Ethereum mainnet will add three new Blob spaces specifically for storing L2 transactions and state data, each with its own gas fee market. It is estimated that the maximum scale of state data stored in one Blob space is approximately equal to one mainnet block, or ~1.77M.
Currently, the daily gas consumption on the Ethereum mainnet is 107.9 billion, with Rollup L2s accounting for about 10% of the gas consumption. According to the supply and demand curve in economics, if the total gas demand for Rollup L2s remains unchanged after the Cancun upgrade, and the block space Ethereum can sell to L2 increases from the current ~10% of one block to three complete Blob blocks, the total supply of block space will expand 30 times, reducing gas prices to 1/30 of their current levels.
However, this conclusion is not reliable, as it assumes too many linear relationships and abstracts away many details that should be considered, especially the competition and game strategies between Rollup L2s for Blob space and their impact on gas prices.
The gas fee consumption of Rollup L2s mainly consists of data availability storage fees (state data storage fees) and data availability verification fees, with the former accounting for as much as ~90%. After the Cancun upgrade, the three new Blob blocks for Rollup L2s are equivalent to three new commons. According to Coase's theory of the commons, in a completely free competition market environment for Ethereum Blob space, there is a high probability that the leading Rollup L2s will abuse the Blob space. This can both ensure their market position and squeeze the living space of competitors.
In such a market with a ceiling limit, Rollup L2s are in a highly tense zero-sum game, competing fiercely for developers, funds, users, and Dapps. After the Cancun upgrade, they will also compete for the three new Blob spaces.
In a market where 'there is only so much meat, and if someone else eats more, you eat less,' it is difficult for Rollup L2s to reach a Pareto-optimal ideal situation.
How will the leading Rollup L2s abuse the Blob space? It is speculated that the leading Rollup L2s will modify the frequency of their sequencer's batch, shortening the current batch time of several minutes to ~12 seconds, synchronizing with the Ethereum mainnet block production speed. This can both improve the fast confirmation of transactions on their L2 and occupy more Blob space to suppress competitors.
Under this competitive strategy, the verification fees and batch fees in the gas fee consumption structure of Rollup L2s will surge, limiting the positive impact of the new Blob spaces on L2 gas fee reduction.
As a result, the positive impact of the increased Blob space on L2 gas fee reduction will have diminishing returns and will become almost ineffective after reaching a certain threshold.
Based on the above analysis, it is predicted that Ethereum L2 gas fees will decrease after the Cancun upgrade, but the decline will be less than market expectations.
