Original source: Odaily Planet Daily
Original author: Kate
Ethereum’s promise of lower fees emerged yesterday with new challenges. While the Dencun upgrade was well-received, the added Blobs feature suddenly caused costs to skyrocket. It is important for cryptocurrency developers to understand the impact of this new surge. The valuable asset of block space is likely to cause backlash.
Event review
On March 14th, Middle March (@dumbnamenumbers), the co-founder of Ethscriptions, said on What is it like?”
Shortly thereafter, in the early morning of March 28th Beijing time, March posted a tweet announcing the official launch of Blobscriptions.
Just one hour later, Ethereum Blob base gas climbed to 14,499,530 wei. March admitted on X that Blobscriptions were the cause of the gas increase.
At around 10:30 Beijing time that day, Buterin tweeted, saying, "The Dencun hard fork has been launched. Thanks to Blobscriptions, the Blob fee market has now entered "price discovery mode."
According to data, the gas fee caused by this event reached a peak of 0.1 ETH, which is about 370 US dollars. This is a far cry from the average gas price BlobScriptions used to mint data on blobs.
On the morning of March 29, according to Ethernow data, Blob gas fee has dropped to around 40 gwei.
According to Dune data, we can see the Blob delivery situation in the past 24 hours:
Blobscription: Some people are happy and some are worried
Why Blobscription is so popular
Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade introduced an economic data package called Blobs, which was originally intended to make transactions smoother. However, users quickly jumped on the opportunity, so much so that blobs, which were once free, are now a scarce commodity.
Middle March launched Ethscriptions, a protocol that allows users to embed multimedia content directly into Ethereum’s “blobs.” Blobscriptions leverage "Blobs" introduced in EIP-4844 to reduce burning costs, allowing anyone to store data on Ethereum 10 to 100 times cheaper than calldata.
The introduction of Inscriptions on Blobs begins to stress test this functionality. These Inscriptions are inspired by Bitcoin Ordinals and embed unique fungible and non-fungible artifacts in Blob transactions.
However, Ethereum itself does not guarantee the availability of Blob data for more than 18 days. This feature makes people have to wonder whether this "crazy engraving" activity will become a "large-scale social experimental game" on the blockchain. However, regarding this issue, March stated on the X platform that the indexer of Ether Inscription will store this data indefinitely. And admitted that the act of saving data on Blobs runs counter to the decentralization concept of Ethereum.
Within days of its initial launch, users created more than 4,500 Blobscriptions. Dune data shows that up to 50% of newly generated blobs are for these inscriptions. Cryptocurrency users seem fascinated by the idea of immortalizing random text and images on the blockchain, which is reminiscent of the inscriptions in Bitcoin’s early days.
A short-lived peak, or a lasting trend that will take root?
Since its release, Dencun has really enabled Ethereum users to begin the transition to affordable L2, which is exactly what Ethereum users wanted. However, this benefit may be short-lived if BlobScriptions continue to clog low-cost channels. Worse, this would negate one of the main selling points touted by the developers of the Ethereum cryptocurrency.
If the initial impact is primarily concentrated on Blobs, the effects of this surge could be felt across the entire Ethereum cryptocurrency ecosystem, with some worrying about impacts on base layer transactions. If the latter, it could undermine one of Dencun’s main goals, which is to drastically reduce transaction costs on the second layer (L2) network.
Even if the BlobScriptions craze proves to be short-lived, the damage has already been great. For example, according to data from Ehternow, the cost of Blob fluctuates around 40 gwei (about $1.35) as of the time of publication. While this figure is significantly lower than the peak of 585 gwei, it is still well above the symbolic price of 1 gwei ($0.01) before the rush.
In short, the sudden emergence of BlobScriptions has completely reignited the debate over Ethereum's actual ability to provide low-cost cryptocurrency transactions. If this trend continues, it may challenge the benefits promised by Dencun. But at the same time, it will also plunge the blockchain back into an uncertain future. A potentially unstable new era seems to be opening up in the surprised eyes of Ethereum developers. Ethereum may need to show great flexibility to survive this delicate period of re-evaluation.
Simple Tutorial
At the end of the article, Odaily still provides a tutorial. However, how much room for speculation there is for Blobscriptions itself, and whether the glory of Bitcoin inscriptions can be reproduced in the future, will also be left for us to further think about.
Address: https://blobscriptions.io/
Steps (see picture below):
Note: After selecting the button to generate a new wallet, please record the private key for future minting use. Before depositing gas fees, you can check the current fees to avoid insufficient balance.
