After the Cancun upgrade was completed, how much did the gas of each chain drop?
Original - Odaily
Author - Azuma
At 9:55 pm Beijing time yesterday, the time slot height (Slot) of the Ethereum beacon chain (Beacon) officially reached 8626176, which is also the scheduled position for the Dencun upgrade, and the upgrade was officially activated.
Regarding the content and impact of Dencun upgrade, Odaily wrote in the previous article Cancun’s upgrade is finally coming, which targets will it benefit?》has been explained in detail. In short, the core content of the Dencun upgrade is EIP-4844. This upgrade aims to introduce a new transaction type Blob transaction to Ethereum by adding an additional The temporary data space Blob is specially used to process Layer 2 related transactions, thereby significantly reducing Layer 2 transaction fees.
So, with the implementation of the upgrade, how much has the transaction cost of Layer 2 dropped?
Next, we will use real tests to compare the real gas change performance of the six mainstream Layer 2s: Arbitrum, Optimism, Starknet, zkSync, Blast, and Base.
It should be emphasized that the Dencun upgrade itself will only be executed on the Ethereum main network. Therefore, if Layer 2 wants to achieve the fee reduction effect, it needs to actively upgrade to adapt to the new Blob transaction, and different Layer 2 will need to adapt to the upgrade. There are differences in time planning. All current Layer 2 fees have not been obvious for the time being. In this case, users still need to wait.
As shown in the figure above, as some Layer 2s have completed the adaptation of Blob transactions, the gas costs of their respective networks have dropped significantly.
In addition, compared to ZK Rollup, the cost reduction of Optimistic Rollup after adaptation seems to be more obvious. Optimism, Base, etc. have almost been reduced to negligible levels - think about 1 US dollar now being clicked 100 times...
For now, Arbitrum is still the Layer 2 network with the smallest reduction in gas costs. However, given that the team has stated that it will further reduce costs after the ArbOS Atlas upgrade on March 18, we hope users will continue to be patient.
The last thing I want to talk about is the gas changes on the Ethereum main network. One of the major misunderstandings that many people have about the Dencun upgrade is that the upgrade will also reduce the gas cost of the Ethereum mainnet. This statement is obviously misunderstood, but it is not entirely unreasonable.
Because judging from the direct logic of the Dencun upgrade (mainly EIP-4844), the core purpose of the upgrade is to use the newly added Blob data space to reduce the cost of synchronizing data from Layer 2 to Layer 1 (Ethereum main network), thereby reducing Layer 2 The transaction fee is not directly related to the gas status of the Ethereum main network.
But indirectly, as the block space occupied by Layer 2 related transactions is released (actually transferred from calldate to Blob), the fee competition pressure faced by other Ethereum mainnet transactions will also be alleviated, so the Dencun upgrade will also be Reduce the transaction fee cost of the Ethereum main network to a certain extent.
However, since Layer 2 related transactions account for a relatively limited share of the total transaction volume of the Ethereum main network, the gas impact of the above changes on the Ethereum main network will not be so obvious.
Overall, Layer 2 is still the biggest beneficiary of Dencun’s upgrade. With the significant reduction of on-chain gas, Layer 2’s influence on projects with “high concurrency requirements” and “low unit value” attributes such as games and social networking will be greatly increased. Can this trigger a new round of Layer 2 application growth? Inspur will be our focus in the next stage.
