At 21:55 on March 13, 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 that replace calldata. The EIP-4844 upgrade can be said to be an inflection point for Ethereum to promote large-scale commercialization. Its goal is to expand Ethereum's data availability, provide larger 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, and some L2s will also additionally reduce gas costs. Foresight News will take stock of Ethereum and L2 Gas fee data and conduct actual transaction measurements to see how much EIP-4844 can reduce Gas fees. Which one is the cheapest?
Goodbye, Calldata!
In the past month, the crypto market has risen as a whole. Bitcoin has continuously broken through all-time highs. The market sentiment has been extremely FOMO. Ethereum transactions have increased rapidly. The average gas fee of 80 USDT to 130 USDT has also made users miserable.
According to data from ultra sound money, the gas fee of Ethereum once reached 190 Gwei on March 6.
According to growthepie data, L2 paid a total of US$2.1 million in gas fees yesterday, and on March 5, L2 paid a total of over US$4.3 million in gas fees, a new high this year. Ethereum Gas fee reduction is imperative.
Overview
According to Blobscan data, on March 13, the Gas used by Blob is now 197,918,720, while the equivalent callda gas of Blob will cost 3,073,477,708. The gas fee of Blob has been reduced by more than 15 times.
Since the Cancun upgrade, the total number of Ethereum blocks is now 1697, the total number of transactions is 1868, and a total of 2029 blobs are used.
Currently, according to L2BEAT and Blobscan data, Optimism, Starknet, Base, zkSync, Zora, and Mode have all adopted blobs, and Starknet has the most blob transactions.
According to L2 Fees data, the gas fees of Optimism, zkSync Era, and Starknet have dropped the most.
According to Dune data, since the Cancun upgrade, the average gas fee of the Optimism network has dropped by 98% from 2.442 USDT to 0.046 USDT; the average gas fee of the Base network has dropped by 94% from 1.069 USDT to 0.06 USDT; and the average gas fee of the zkSync network has dropped by 77% from 0.66 USDT. % to 0.151 USDT; the Zora network’s average gas fee dropped by 98% from 1.423 USDT to 0.022 USDT; the Arbitrum network’s gas fee dropped by 48% from 0.968 USDT to 0.503 USDT.
In addition, the median Optimism network gas fee has been reduced by 99% from 0.669 USDT to 0.004 USDT; the median Base network gas fee has been reduced by 99% from 0.7747 USDT to 0.0012 USDT; the median zkSync network gas fee has been reduced by 69% from 0.3078 USDT to 0.0951 USDT; the Zora network gas fee median dropped by 99% from 0.7253 USDT to 0.0009 USDT; the Arbitrum network gas fee median dropped by 50% from 0.6717 USDT to 0.3335 USDT.
Starknet
Yesterday, the Starknet mainnet was upgraded to Starknet 0.13.1 during the Ethereum Cancun upgrade, using the Blob data type and additional fee reductions. The actual gas fee was as low as $0.01.
Transfer: Gas tends to 0.
Swap: The actual Gas fee is 0.02 USDT.
Optimism
Transfer: The transfer gas fee on Optimism tends to be 0, while the transaction fee for a transfer 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 will be 0.11 USDT after returning 0.13 USDT.
Swap: The initial gas fee is 0.78 USDT. After returning 0.67 USDT, the gas fee is actually 0.11 USDT. Some transactions will be lower than 0.1 USDT.
Base
Today, Base community contributor Jesse Pollak said that Base has launched Blob and the Base network transaction fee has been reduced from $0.31 to $0.0005. In addition, "the wallet needs to be updated to achieve cost reduction."
Transfer: Gas fee tends to 0.
Swap: Gas is close to 0.
Arbitrum
Arbitrum's ArbOS Atlas upgrade will be executed on all Arbitrum chains at 21:41:35 Beijing time on March 14. Once the upgrade is implemented, expect it to take an hour or two for blob transactions to begin rolling out and for the new EIP-4844 pricing changes to begin to appear. ArbOS Atlas also introduces additional Arbitrum fee reductions for Arbitrum One, which is expected to be activated on March 18.
At present, the handling fees on Arbitrum have not been significantly reduced.
Linea
Linea has not yet introduced Blobs, and the current transaction fees are much higher than other L2s.
BNB Chain
BNB Chain will launch an upgrade called "BEP 336", which will refer to Ethereum's EIP 4844 and introduce the concept of "Blob Carrying Transaction" (BlobTx). BSC will provide a dynamic Gas pricing mechanism for blobs and set up Set minimum and maximum thresholds to maintain reasonable transaction costs.
