Permanently low prices on Ethereum rollups – BitcoinBlog.de – the blog for Bitcoin and other virtual currencies

Last week the Dencun upgrade on Ethereum was activated. With EIP-4844 it made running rollups cheaper. As hoped, the fees fell drastically. Does this make Vitalik Buterin’s ideal of the “Internet of Money” come true?

We have already written about Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade, in particular about the hoped-for reduction in the operation of rollups through EIP-4844.

In a nutshell: EIP-4844 introduces a new data format that exempts the data that rollups have to store on the main chain – the beacon chain – from the fee market. Last week, on March 13th, the upgrade went live without any problems.

Anyone who occasionally uses rollups or looks at the corresponding charts can observe the consequences. While previously you would happily pay 10 to 50 cents for transactions or a token swap on Arbitrum or Optimism – which was a huge relief compared to the fees on Ethereum – they now fell to less than a cent.

A chart on Dune Analytics shows the massive drop in fees. Comparing today’s fees to seven days ago, they are down more than 90 percent on most rollups. To name just a few prominent examples: at Base by 98.8 percent to 0.67 cents, at Optimism by 98.2 percent to 0.87 cents, at Arbitrum “only” by 87.3 percent to 1.2 cents .

Vitalik Buterin’s long-derided saying that a transaction on the Internet of Money less than a cent should cost becomes true. The new normal fee level on Ethereum rollups almost consistently drops to less or barely more than a cent.

Apparently this hasn’t quite caught on in the market yet. At least so far, the transaction activity on the rollups has hardly adapted. There has so far been no explosion in transactions as a result of the massive discount.