A groundbreaking method for adding data to the Ethereum blockchain known as “BlobScriptions” has caused a surge in Blob fees, which are the fees required for a blob to be included in an Ethereum block.
On March 27, Ethscriptions introduced BlobScriptions, a protocol that allows users to directly inscribe data, ranging from JPEGs to text, onto “blobs.” Blobs were introduced to the Ethereum network as part of the Dencun upgrade on March 13.
Within five hours of the launch of BlobScriptions, the gas fees for Blobs skyrocketed to 585 gwei, equivalent to approximately $18, according to data from Ultrasound.money. This was a significant increase compared to the average gas price of one wei, which is equivalent to a fraction of $0.01, before the introduction of BlobScriptions.
However, Blob fees have since decreased significantly from their peak. At the time of writing, blob fees are at 35.8 gwei, equivalent to $1.20, according to Coinbrain conversion data.
Since the introduction of BlobScriptions, users have made over 4,500 inscriptions on blobs, as reported by Dune Analytics.
In a post on March 27, Ethscriptions founder Tom Lehman, also known as Middlemarch, acknowledged the rising cost of “blobspace” and encouraged users to mint BlobScriptions using the official blobscription protocol.
Similar to the early days of Bitcoin Ordinals, Ethereum users are choosing to mint small snippets of text and seemingly random collections of images on blobs. The most recent activity on blobscription.io shows hundreds of new images added in the past few hours.
It’s important to note that blob data is only stored on Ethereum nodes for approximately 18 days. After that period, BlobScriptions data will be removed from the network. However, Lehman assured users that the Ethscriptions indexer would store the data indefinitely.
Blobs were introduced through EIP-4844, a core data-saving feature of Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade. This upgrade primarily aimed to reduce transaction costs on layer-2 networks significantly.
Following the Dencun upgrade, transaction fees on Ethereum L2s experienced a significant decrease. Swap fees on Arbitrum dropped from around $1.25 to below $0.02, while Polygon fees decreased by a similar amount.
To celebrate the lower fees associated with blobs, an Ethereum developer 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.