Written by Tom Mitchelhill, CoinTelegraph
Compiled by: Wuzhu, Golden Finance
Frenetic airdrop requests for a new ethereum layer-two network called Scroll briefly drove up the cost of a blob as high as $4.52, the third time a blob has become expensive since ethereum’s Dencun upgrade in March.
“The Scroll airdrop claim simply triggered the blob market, they are no longer free,” Hil Doby, an anonymous crypto data analyst, said in an Oct. 22 post to X.
He attributed the rise in blob fees to the airdrop of Ethereum L2 Scroll, which listed its governance token SCR on Binance and airdropped tokens to its users on October 22.
Source: Hildobby
On October 22, blob fees hit a four-month high of $4.52, according to Dune Analytics.
Significant increases in blob prices have only occurred twice before — once during a surge in L2 activity in July, and again on March 27 during the launch of Blobscriptions, a protocol that allows users to write data directly to blobs.
Increasing blob fees is a double-edged sword for Ethereum. More expensive blobs result in more blob gas being paid to the network; however, they also drive up the costs associated with executing transactions and transfers on Ethereum L2s.
On October 22, the Blob fee peaked at $4.52. Source: Dune Analytics
Notably, as L2 activity slowed, the price of blob fees quickly fell back down, bringing the cost down to near zero at the time of publishing.
Just a month ago, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin highlighted this point in a September speech. The “blob count” (the maximum number of blobs available per block) is close to full capacity and could soon hinder Ethereum’s scalability if nothing is done to address the issue.
A few weeks later, on October 18, Ethereum developers announced a new Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) aimed at increasing the current fixed “blob count” — the maximum number of blobs available per block.
Christine Kim, vice president of research at Galaxy Digital, said EIP-7742 will create a mechanism for the Ethereum consensus layer to "dynamically" set Blob Gas targets and maximums and improve network scalability in the upcoming Pectra upgrade.
Blobs were introduced as part of Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade in March, an improvement focused on reducing transaction costs on the Ethereum L2 network.
With the introduction of blobs and raw danksharding, transaction fees on Ethereum L2 have dropped significantly. Arbitrum’s swap fees have plummeted from around $1.25 to under $0.02, while Polygon fees have dropped by a similar amount.
Notably, Ethereum developer Dan Cline wrote the entire Bee Movie script onto the Ethereum mainnet for just $14, demonstrating the cost-saving capabilities of Blobs as a temporary data storage unit.
