Key Points
- A new method for minting data to the Ethereum blockchain, called “BlobScriptions”, is increasing the price of Blob fees.
- The introduction of BlobScriptions has resulted in users inscribing a variety of data onto blobs, from text to images.
A trending technique for adding data to the Ethereum blockchain, known as “BlobScriptions”, is causing a surge in Blob fees. These are the costs necessary for a blob to be included in an Ethereum block.
Introduction of BlobScriptions
The Ethscriptions protocol introduced BlobScriptions on March 27. This new feature permits users to inscribe data, ranging from JPEGs to text, directly onto “blobs”. These blobs were added to the Ethereum network during the Dencun upgrade on March 13.
Within five hours of BlobScriptions’ debut, the gas fees for Blobs skyrocketed to 585 gwei, approximately $18. This is a stark contrast to the average gas price for minting data on a blob before BlobScriptions, which was about one wei, a tiny fraction of $0.01.
Current Status of Blob Fees
However, Blob fees have significantly decreased from their recent peak. At the time of writing, blob fees are at 35.8 gwei, or $1.20, according to Coinbrain conversion data. Additionally, there have been over 4,500 inscriptions on blobs since the introduction of BlobScriptions, as per Dune Analytics data.
Tom Lehman, the founder of Ethscriptions who uses the alias Middlemarch, acknowledged the rising cost of “blobspace”. He encouraged users to mint BlobScriptions through the official blobscription protocol.
Similar to the early days of Bitcoin Ordinals, Ethereum users are choosing to mint small text pieces and seemingly random image assortments to blobs. The most recent activity on blobscription.io shows hundreds of new images added in the last few hours.
It’s important to note that blob data is only stored on Ethereum nodes for about 18 days. After this period, BlobScriptions data will be removed from the network. However, Lehman stated that the Ethscriptions indexer would store the data “indefinitely”.
Blobs were introduced via EIP-4844, a core data-saving feature of Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade. The primary focus of this upgrade was to significantly reduce transaction costs on layer-2 networks.
Transaction fees on Ethereum L2s dropped drastically after the Dencun upgrade. Swap fees on Arbitrum fell from around $1.25 to below $0.02, and Polygon fees decreased by a similar amount. One Ethereum developer even managed to mint the entire script of the Bee Movie on an Ethereum blob less than 15 minutes after the upgrade went live, all for less than $13 in ETH gas fees.