IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/arx/papers/2502.12966.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Early Days of the Ethereum Blob Fee Market and Lessons Learnt

Author

Listed:
  • Lioba Heimbach
  • Jason Milionis

Abstract

Ethereum has adopted a rollup-centric roadmap to scale by making rollups (layer 2 scaling solutions) the primary method for handling transactions. The first significant step towards this goal was EIP-4844, which introduced blob transactions that are designed to meet the data availability needs of layer 2 protocols. This work constitutes the first rigorous and comprehensive empirical analysis of transaction- and mempool-level data since the institution of blobs on Ethereum on March 13, 2024. We perform a longitudinal study of the early days of the blob fee market analyzing the landscape and the behaviors of its participants. We identify and measure the inefficiencies arising out of suboptimal block packing, showing that at times it has resulted in up to 70% relative fee loss. We hone in and give further insight into two (congested) peak demand periods for blobs. Finally, we document a market design issue relating to subset bidding due to the inflexibility of the transaction structure on packing data as blobs and suggest possible ways to fix it. The latter market structure issue also applies more generally for any discrete objects included within transactions.

Suggested Citation

  • Lioba Heimbach & Jason Milionis, 2025. "The Early Days of the Ethereum Blob Fee Market and Lessons Learnt," Papers 2502.12966, arXiv.org.
  • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2502.12966
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.12966
    File Function: Latest version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2502.12966. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: arXiv administrators (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://arxiv.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.