Goodbye Calldata! A Overview of the Mainstream Layer 2 Fee Reduction Trend
Starknet and Optimism transaction fees have been significantly reduced, while Base transaction fees tend towards 0.Written by: Peng SUN, Foresight News
On March 13, 21:55 Beijing time, the Ethereum mainnet officially activated the Dencun upgrade at block height 269568. The most important part of this upgrade includes EIP-4844, which introduces temporary data blobs to replace calldata. The EIP-4844 upgrade can be seen as a turning point for Ethereum's push towards large-scale commercialization, aiming to expand Ethereum's data availability, provide greater storage space for L2 data, and reduce L2 gas fees by 10 to 100 times.
Since last night, L2s such as Starknet, Optimism, Arbitrum, zkSync, Base, Zora, and Mode have successively announced upgrades to use blobs, with some L2s also reducing gas costs further. Foresight News will review Ethereum and L2 gas fee data and conduct practical tests to see how much EIP-4844 can actually reduce gas fees and which is the cheapest.
Goodbye, Calldata!
In the past month, the overall cryptocurrency market has risen, with Bitcoin continuously breaking historical highs, leading to extreme FOMO in market sentiment. Ethereum transactions have surged, and the average gas fee of 80 USDT to 130 USDT has left users in distress.
According to ultra sound money data, on March 6, Ethereum gas fees once surged to 190 Gwei.
According to growthepie data, yesterday L2s paid a total of 2.1 million USD in gas fees, while on March 5, L2s paid over 4.3 million USD in gas fees, setting a new high for the year. A reduction in Ethereum gas fees is imperative.
Overview
According to Blobscan data, on March 13, the gas used for blobs was 197,918,720, while the gas equivalent to calldata would cost 3,073,477,708, indicating that blobs have reduced gas fees by over 15 times.
Since the Cancun upgrade, the total number of Ethereum blocks is now 1697, with a total of 1868 transactions, using 2029 blobs.
Currently, according to L2BEAT and Blobscan data, Optimism, Starknet, Base, zkSync, Zora, and Mode have all adopted blobs, with Starknet having the most blob transactions.
According to L2 Fees data, Optimism, zkSync Era, and Starknet have seen the largest reductions in gas fees.
According to Dune data, since the Cancun upgrade, the average gas fee on the Optimism network has decreased by 98% from 2.442 USDT to 0.046 USDT; the average gas fee on the Base network has decreased by 94% from 1.069 USDT to 0.06 USDT; the average gas fee on the zkSync network has decreased by 77% from 0.66 USDT to 0.151 USDT; the average gas fee on the Zora network has decreased by 98% from 1.423 USDT to 0.022 USDT; and the gas fee on the Arbitrum network has decreased by 48% from 0.968 USDT to 0.503 USDT.
Additionally, the median gas fee on the Optimism network has decreased by 99% from 0.669 USDT to 0.004 USDT; the median gas fee on the Base network has decreased by 99% from 0.7747 USDT to 0.0012 USDT; the median gas fee on the zkSync network has decreased by 69% from 0.3078 USDT to 0.0951 USDT; the median gas fee on the Zora network has decreased by 99% from 0.7253 USDT to 0.0009 USDT; and the median gas fee on the Arbitrum network has decreased by 50% from 0.6717 USDT to 0.3335 USDT.
Starknet
Yesterday, the Starknet mainnet underwent the Starknet 0.13.1 upgrade during the Ethereum Cancun upgrade, utilizing blob data types and providing additional fee reductions, with actual gas fees as low as 0.01 USD.
Transfer: Gas approaches 0.
Swap: Actual gas fee is 0.02 USDT.
Optimism
Transfer: Gas fees for transfers on Optimism approach 0, while a transfer transaction fee I made a few days ago was 0.68 USDT.
Swap: Gas is 0.01 USDT.
zkSync
Transfer: The gas fee was originally 0.24 USDT, and after a refund of 0.13 USDT, it was 0.11 USDT.
Swap: The initial gas fee was 0.78 USDT, and after a refund of 0.67 USDT, the actual gas fee was 0.11 USDT, with some transactions even going below 0.1 USDT.
Base
Today, Base community contributor Jesse Pollak stated that Base has launched blobs, and transaction fees on the Base network have dropped from 0.31 USD to 0.0005 USD. Additionally, "wallets need to be updated to realize cost reductions."
Transfer: Gas fees approach 0.
Swap: Gas is close to 0.
Arbitrum
The ArbOS Atlas upgrade for Arbitrum will be executed on all Arbitrum chains at 21:41:35 Beijing time on March 14. Once the upgrade begins, it is expected that blob transactions will take one to two hours to start being published, and the new EIP-4844 pricing changes will begin to manifest. ArbOS Atlas also introduces additional Arbitrum fee reductions for Arbitrum One, which is expected to be activated on March 18.
Currently, transaction fees on Arbitrum have not significantly decreased.
Linea
Linea has not yet introduced blobs, and its transaction fees are currently much higher than other L2s.
BNB Chain
BNB Chain will launch an upgrade called "BEP 336," which will reference Ethereum's EIP 4844 and introduce the concept of "Blob-carrying transactions" (BlobTx). BSC will provide a dynamic gas pricing mechanism for blobs and set minimum and maximum thresholds to maintain reasonable transaction costs.
