Transaction fees on Ethereum layer-2 (L2) protocols have experienced a significant decrease, with some protocols seeing a reduction of up to 99% following the Dencun upgrade on March 13. Dencun, a scalability-focused upgrade on the Ethereum mainnet, is considered one of the most significant upgrades since the Merge.
Starknet, a prominent Ethereum-based L2, has witnessed a 99% decrease in gas fees since the upgrade. The protocol shared a screenshot showing its latest gas fee, which now stands at $0.04, compared to over $6 prior to the Dencun upgrade.
Other L2 platforms such as Optimism, Base, and Zora OP mainnet have also experienced a dramatic decline in gas fees after the Dencun upgrade. The average transaction fees for Optimism dropped to $0.05, $0.064 for Base, $0.5 for Arbitrum, and $0.16 for zkSync Era. Optimism and chains using Optimism’s technology, like Base, have seen the most significant reductions in gas fees within 24 hours of the upgrade.
Arbitrum One, one of the most widely used L2 platforms, plans to launch its ArbOS upgrade today, which will introduce blob support to Arbitrum rollup chains. The Dencun hard fork introduced nine Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), with EIP-484 introducing data blobs as a new transaction data type for L2s. These data blobs bypass the traditional “call data” process and enable faster transactions at lower fees on the Ethereum mainnet. The Dencun upgrade took two years to develop.
The goal of the latest Ethereum upgrade was to improve scalability and reduce gas fees. Initial indications suggest that the hard fork has successfully helped L2s lower transaction costs. However, experts believe that Dencun may only serve as a temporary solution and may not be sufficient to fully scale the Ethereum network.
As the number of rollups using blobs increases and the competition for blob space intensifies, the low cost of L2 chains utilizing blobs may lead to higher fees in the future, resulting in increased transaction costs.