According to Blockworks, Ethscriptions, a website that allows users to mint inscriptions on EIP-4844 blobs, has caused a significant increase in the price of Ethereum's blob base fee. EIP-4844 blobs are cost-saving data packets introduced in Ethereum's recent Dencun upgrade. Since the upgrade, the base fee for a blob has been one wei, equivalent to a fraction of $0.01. However, the blob base fee has now climbed above 500 gwei, marking a 60 trillion percent increase over the one wei blobs cost in the two weeks since Dencun. At the time of writing, the blob fee was roughly 6 gwei, equal to around $0.20.
Inscriptions, which have gained popularity on Bitcoin recently, provide an inexpensive way to embed art or tokens onto a blockchain. In the case of BlobScriptions, various images and tokens are being inscribed on blobs. However, it is important to note that blob data is only kept by Ethereum nodes for approximately 18 days, after which BlobScriptions will disappear from Ethereum. Despite this, BlobScriptions will still be stored in the indexer for creator protocol Ethscriptions, according to co-founder Tom Lehman. The goal of using blobs for inscriptions is to allow people to avoid using expensive smart contracts for data storage.