Blob base fee surges, Ethereum misses slots as ‘BlobScriptions’ go viral

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28 Mar 2024

The prices for the data-saving feature are drastically increasing due to a new technique for enscribing data on Ethereum blobs.
Blob fees, the sum needed for a blob to be included in an Ethereum block, are rising as a result of a new, widely used technique called "BlobScriptions" for minting data to the Ethereum blockchain.
A protocol known as Ethscriptions unveiled BlobScriptions on March 27. This feature enables users to directly engrave data, such as text or JPEGs, into "blobs," which were added to the Ethereum network on March 13 as part of the network's Dencun upgrade.
According to data from Ultrasound. money, the gas expenses for Blobs increased to 585 gwei, or almost $18, less than five hours after BlobScriptions were introduced.
Before BlobScriptions, the average gas price for minting data on a blob was approximately one wei, or a minuscule fraction of $0.01. This was a far cry from that.

Blob fees soared following the introduction of BlobScriptions. Source: Ultrasound. money

But since then, Blob fees have significantly decreased from their recently recorded peak. According to Coinbrain conversion data, blob fees are currently 35.8 gwei, or $1.20, at the time of posting.
Meanwhile, data from Dune Analytics shows that since BlobScriptions were introduced, users have scribed over 4,500 blobs.
Tom Lehman, also known as Middlemarch, is the founder of Ethscriptions. He posted on March 27 on X, pointing out that the price of "blobspace" is increasing and advising users to mint BlobScriptions via the official protocol.

Ethereum users are choosing to add short text segments and seemingly arbitrary collections of images to blobs, much as in the early days of Bitcoin Ordinals. The latest activity on blobscription.io reveals hundreds of new photographs contributed in the previous few hours.

It should be noted that blob data is only kept on Ethereum nodes for about eighteen days; beyond that time, blobScriptions data will be deleted from the network. Lehman did, however, note that the data will be kept "indefinitely" by the Ethscriptions indexer.
Blobs were first made possible by EIP-4844, a key data-saving feature of Ethereum's Dencun update that was mainly intended to drastically lower transaction costs on layer-2 networks.
Following the Dencun upgrade, transaction fees on Ethereum L2s dropped significantly. For example, swap prices on Arbitrum dropped from approximately $1.25 to less than $0.02, while Polygon fees also decreased by a comparable amount.
Less than 15 minutes after the update went live, one Ethereum developer managed to mint the full script of the Bee Movie on an Ethereum blob for less than $13 in ETH gas fees, praising the lower fees associated with blobs.