8 pictures to understand the new L2 battlefield opened after the Dencun upgrade?

As the most important milestone for Ethereum in 2024, the Dencun upgrade has officially activated on the mainnet, with the most notable aspect being the introduction of the EIP-4844 proposal, which carries blob transactions. For ordinary Web3 users, the most intuitive change it brings is that the Gas fees required for transactions and transfers on L2 will be significantly reduced.

It is worth noting that, as the most fiercely competitive track in Ethereum, the competition among L2s has been intense. With the gradual integration of various L2s, who will benefit from the cost reduction and efficiency improvements brought by the Dencun upgrade? What impacts will it have on the L2 landscape?

Therefore, this article aims to leverage the Dencun Upgrade Special Page launched by OKLink to explore the dimensions from which we can monitor the changes in the L2 competitive landscape and capture potential signals in a timely manner.

What is the impact of the Dencun upgrade on L2?

The Dencun upgrade includes multiple EIP proposals, with the core content comprising five proposals: EIP-4844, EIP-1153 (temporary storage), EIP-5656 (MCOPY opcode), EIP-6780 (SELFDESTRUCT opcode), and EIP-7044/7055 (staking improvements).

Among them, EIP-4844 is the cornerstone of this upgrade—it introduces a transaction model that carries blobs, meaning that in the future, L2s can choose not to use the traditional calldata storage mechanism.

So, what are blob-carrying transactions? In simple terms, it is embedding a large amount of transaction data into blobs, which can significantly reduce the storage and processing burden on the Ethereum mainnet.

This directly addresses the L1 cost issues related to data availability, ensuring that L2 platforms can offer cheaper and faster transactions without compromising the security and decentralization of Ethereum.

In short, the biggest change brought by blobs is that the data uploaded from L2 to L1 has shifted from permanent storage in calldata to temporary storage in blobs, which is expected to reduce Rollup costs by 10-50 times (still to be determined) and increase transaction throughput. Additionally, since Rollup data will no longer compete for normal block space, the costs of other L1 transactions should also decrease.

From a data perspective, after EIP-4844, it is expected that the L1 portion of the transaction cost composition for Ethereum L2 will decrease by about 50%-90%, and in an ideal scenario, it could even reach 99%.

With the current ETH price rising and mainnet Gas fees being high, the cost of ETH transfers on L2 is around $0.5 - $1, which means that L2s integrating EIP-4844 are expected to reduce this cost to between $0.005 - $0.1. Of course, the actual cost is related to different L2 solutions, ETH prices, Gas, and other factors, requiring specific calculations.

However, this also brings new issues, as blob storage is temporary, with a usable time of 4,096 epochs, or about 18 days.

Projects like OKLink, which have always leaned towards providing public goods for blockchain, have also announced that they will be responsible for securely storing all blob data, ensuring the security and retrievability of historical data to support the healthy development of the Ethereum and L2 ecosystems, providing a solution that balances cost and reliability.

8 Charts for a Comprehensive Insight into the Dencun Upgrade

Here, we will combine the data from OKLink's Dencun upgrade special page to explore in detail the dimensions from which we can monitor the actual improvement effects and direct impacts of the upcoming Cancun upgrade on each L2.

1. L2 Transaction Fees

First, naturally, are the transaction fees on each L2 network. For end users of L2, cheaper transactions are undoubtedly the most attractive key point.

As shown in the figure below, currently, the average transaction fees of various L2 networks before the Dencun upgrade show that the overall costs of ZK Rollup systems are significantly higher than those of Optimistic Rollup systems:

Among them, Polygon zkEVM ranks first at $3.67, while zkSync Era leads with the cheapest transaction cost at $0.39. Overall, the transaction costs of Optimistic Rollup systems are concentrated between $0.41 and $0.97, while Starknet, Scroll, and others are generally above $1.5, often more than double.

It is important to note that previously, the total transaction fees for ZK Rollup L2 included sending proofs to the Ethereum chain for verification, and with the Dencun upgrade, this cost will decrease significantly.

Therefore, the impact on the user perception of ZK Rollup can be closely monitored—whether it will effectively lead to a noticeable decrease in transaction fees, enhancing the attractiveness of ZK Rollup L2s.

2. L2 Daily Transaction Count

On this basis, the daily transaction count of each L2 becomes the most intuitive data for "users voting with their feet."

OKLink data shows that currently, apart from Linea and zkSync, which have daily transaction counts exceeding 1 million, other L2s are hovering between 8,000 and 900,000.

If, after the Dencun upgrade, any L2's daily transaction count surges and breaks through its previous bottleneck, it indicates that the EIP-4844 upgrade has directly impacted the corresponding solution, thus benefiting from it.

3. L2 Daily Transaction Volume

The observation of L2 daily transaction volume is similar to that of daily transaction count. Currently, apart from Arbitrum and zkSync, which maintain daily volumes above 100,000 ETH, other L2s are far behind.

4. L2 TPS

Optimizing TPS means that developers have greater flexibility in building and deploying dApps, which is expected to foster more complex, data-intensive applications, thereby attracting a broader user base.

Therefore, the impact of the Dencun upgrade on the TPS of each L2 is particularly noteworthy, especially for L2s like Polygon zkEVM (approximately 0.09 transactions/second) and Manta Pacific (approximately 0.5 transactions/second), which already have low TPS:

Compared to Arbitrum, zkSync, and others with TPS above 10 transactions/second, even a similar magnitude of improvement could result in differences of several times or even dozens of times, which relates to whether they can expand to support high-throughput, low-cost consumer application scenarios.

5. L2 Address Overview

In the overview of L2 addresses, changes in the number of contract addresses are directly related to the practicality and influence of ecological projects and partners.

The total number of active addresses indicates whether it can continuously attract a diverse user base and draw more incremental users into the ecosystem through this upgrade.

6. L2 TVB

First, let's clarify the definition of TVB, which mainly refers to the amount of ETH transferred from Ethereum to each L2 daily, with data updated at midnight for the previous day.

This dimension of data can directly show the attractiveness of each L2 to the existing ETH on the Ethereum main chain after the Dencun upgrade—if attractiveness increases, the TVB amount will significantly increase; if attractiveness declines, the TVB amount will likely decrease.

From the perspective of internal competition among L2s, it may be a zero-sum state of mutual gain and loss. Of course, if the overall trend is growth, it indicates that the Dencun upgrade has significantly enhanced the overall attractiveness of L2s, thereby attracting Ethereum main chain users to migrate their ETH to L2.

7. L2 TVL

Currently, Arbitrum and Optimism's TVL are almost in a league of their own among all L2s. Therefore, whoever can seize the opportunity presented by the Dencun upgrade to attract more users and funds may achieve a significant leap.

8. L2 Token Prices

The changes in all the above dimensions ultimately affect the actual performance of token prices. Whoever can lead the secondary market performance after the Dencun upgrade will undoubtedly be the biggest winner.

The New Battlefield for L2 Has Just Begun

Overall, for ordinary users, the Dencun upgrade's impact on the competitive landscape of the L2 track is far from the end; rather, it is the beginning of a new battlefield.

As time changes and circumstances evolve, with the launch of a new cycle, the heated competition among L2s, combined with the further reduction of costs and TPS from the Dencun upgrade, means that many previously limited on-chain derivatives and other use cases can gradually be realized, making a new DeFi Summer not impossible.

Especially the changes in the above dimensions pave the way for higher transaction throughput and enhanced scalability, directly enabling the Ethereum ecosystem to support a wider range of applications and services, thereby attracting a broader user base.

Who will be the biggest winner among them?

Currently, we do not know, but by continuously tracking data tools and comprehensively grasping the changes in on-chain data corresponding to L2, we can deeply participate in the new landscape changes of L2 and seize potential opportunities for profit.