According to CoinDesk, the Ethereum blockchain recently completed a significant upgrade to create a dedicated space for storing data, known as 'blobs,' in an effort to reduce fees and alleviate congestion. However, a new project called Ethscriptions has already caused a spike in fees and put the blob space to its first major stress test. Ethereum gas fees for blobs surged after Ethscriptions introduced a new method of inscribing data, or minting inscriptions, on the data blobs, called 'blobscriptions.' The blob base fee reached at least 582 gwei ($266) on Wednesday, according to the Dune Analytics dashboard. By Thursday, the blob base fee had dropped to around 18 gwei ($8.69).
The blob space is crucial for layer-2 networks like Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, and Coinbase's Base, which have been built on top of Ethereum to process transactions more quickly and cheaply than on the main chain. These layer-2 networks need to store large amounts of data on Ethereum, accounting for a significant portion of their overall costs. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin acknowledged in a blog post on Thursday that the Blobscriptions incident had pushed the new blob-fee market into 'price discovery mode,' but he noted that data fees were still much cheaper than they would have been under the old system of storing data as 'calldata' in a regular Ethereum transaction. Buterin stated that scaling work would continue to take place, but it would be more incremental.