After the Cancun upgrade is completed, how much has the gas cost of each chain dropped?

At 9:55 pm Beijing time yesterday, the time slot height (Slot) of the Ethereum beacon chain (Beacon) officially reached 8626176. This is also the scheduled position for the Dencun upgrade, and the upgrade was officially activated.

Regarding the content and impact of the Dencun upgrade, Odaily Planet Daily published an article in the previous article "The Cancun 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 needs to 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 2 There are differences in the time planning for adaptation and upgrade. All current costs of Layer 2 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.

Compared with ZK Rollup, the cost reduction of Optimistic Rollup after adaptation seems to be more significant. The cost of solutions such as Optimism and Base has dropped to a level that can be ignored. For example, 100 operations can be performed for 1 dollar.

At present, Arbitrum still has the smallest gas cost reduction among the Layer 2 networks, but the team has stated that it will further reduce costs after the ArbOS Atlas upgrade on March 18. Therefore, users are advised to be patient and wait.

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 fee of the Ethereum main network. This statement is obviously misunderstood, but it is not completely unreasonable.

Because 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 need for Layer 2 to synchronize data to Layer 1 (Ethereum main network) fees, thereby reducing Layer 2 transaction fees, which 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. Therefore, the Dencun upgrade will also 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.

In general, Layer 2 is still the biggest beneficiary of Dencun’s upgrade. With the significant reduction of gas on the chain, the influence of Layer 2 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 application growth for Layer 2? Inspur will be our focus in the next stage.

The above is the detailed content of After the Cancun upgrade is completed, how much has the gas cost of each chain dropped?. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!