After the Cancun upgrade, will the gas fee of Ethereum L2 really be reduced by more than 90%?

Written by NingNing

#Today’s market has a consensus: after the Cancun upgrade, the average gas fee of Ethereum L2 will be reduced by 10 times or even more high.

After the deployment of the upgraded core protocol EIP4844 in Cancun, the Ethereum mainnet will add 3 blob spaces dedicated to storing L2 transactions and state data. These blob spaces have independent Gas Fee markets. The estimated maximum storage state data size of each Blob space is approximately equal to one mainnet block, which is approximately 1.77M.

The current daily gas consumption of the Ethereum main network is 107.9b, and the Gas consumption of Rollup L2 accounts for ~10%.

According to the supply and demand curve of economics:

Price = total demand/total supply,

Assume that Rollup after Cancun is upgraded The total gas demand of L2 remains unchanged, and the block space that Ethereum can sell to L2 has changed from ~10% of the current 1 block to 3 complete Blob blocks, which is equivalent to the total supply of block space. If expanded by 30 times, the price of Gas will be reduced to 1/30 of the original value.

But this conclusion is not reliable because it presupposes too many linear relationship assumptions and abstracts away too many detailed factors that should be included in the calculation and consideration, especially the relationship between Rollup L2 The impact of competition and gaming strategies in the Blob space on Gas prices.

Rollup L2's gas fee consumption is mainly composed of two parts: data availability storage fee (status data storage fee) and data availability verification fee. Among them, data availability storage costs currently account for ~90%.

After the Cancun upgrade, for Rollup L2, the three new Blob blocks are equivalent to three new public lands. According to Coase's commons theory, in a market environment with completely free competition in the Ethereum Blob space, there is a high probability that the currently leading Rollup L2 players will abuse the Blob space. This can ensure their market position on the one hand, and squeeze the living space of competitors on the other.

The following figure shows the profit statistics of 5 Rollup L2s for one year. It can be found that their monthly profit scale shows obvious seasonal changes, but there is no obvious overall growth trend.

In such an involution market with a ceiling limit, Rollup L2 is in a state of zero-sum game that has been highly tense. There is fierce competition among developers, funds, users and DApps. After the upgrade of Cancun, they are fiercely competing for three additional blob spaces.

In the market situation of "there is only so much meat, if others eat one more bite, you will eat one less bite", it is difficult for Rollup L2 to achieve the ideal situation of Pareto optimality.

How will the leading Rollup L2s abuse the Blob space?

Personally guessed that the head Rollup L2 will modify the Batch frequency of the Sequencer, shortening the current Batch once every few minutes to once every 12 seconds, in line with the Ethereum main network block generation The speed remains synchronized. This can not only improve the quick confirmation of transactions on your own L2, but also occupy more blob space to suppress competitors.

Under this competitive strategy, the verification fee and Batch fee in the Gas fee consumption structure of Rollup L2 will surge. This will limit the positive impact of additional blob space on L2 gas fee reduction.

The results are shown in the figure above. When the Blob space increases, the positive impact on L2 Gas fee reduction will decrease at the margin. And after reaching a certain threshold, it will almost fail.

Based on the above analysis, I personally judge that the gas fee of Ethereum L2 will decrease after the Cancun upgrade, but the degree of decrease will be less than market expectations.

The above is the detailed content of After the Cancun upgrade, will the gas fee of Ethereum L2 really be reduced by more than 90%?. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!