Are Current Ethereum Layer 2 Networks Cheap Enough?

With simple contract interactions now costing in the hundreds of dollars, Vitalik Buterin has shifted his focus to scaling Ethereum. Demand for blockspace on the mainnet has skyrocketed over the last year, and transaction fees are pricing many users out of using the most coveted decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible token (NFT) ecosystem.

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How is this being solved in the short term without sacrificing decentralization? Buterin claims, “Rollups are in the short and medium term, and possibly in the long term, the only trustless scaling solution for Ethereum.” Plenty of alternative layer 1 blockchains have looked for expandable systems outside of vertical rollups but have sacrificed liveliness, state growth and more, something the Ethereum developer community has taken a strong stance against.

Are current layer 2 companion networks cheap enough?

Read more: Ethereum Could Hold Lead as Dominant Smart-Contract Blockchain: Coinbase Analysts

“Rollups are significantly reducing fees for many Ethereum users: Optimism and Arbitrum frequently provide fees that are ~3-8x lower than the Ethereum base layer itself, and ZK rollups, which have better data compression and can avoid including signatures, have fees ~40-100x lower than the base layer,” said Buterin.

Even without token subsidies, these rollups have seen significant adoption and are highlighting the demand for cheaper access to Ethereum. Arbitrum, for example, currently has over $2 billion in total value locked (TVL) and is home to a DeFi ecosystem that is beginning to show some promise. However, Buterin believes rollup fees must be even cheaper if they are going to encourage adoption in payments, gaming, and Web 3-focused products.

While the merge to proof-of-stake is still several months away, and sharding is likely even further down the road, Buterin proposed to implement an aspect of sharding before the upgrade is actually incorporated into Ethereum. By introducing “blob-carrying transactions,” a type of data-intensive transaction that will be implemented under sharding, rollups would have 1-2 MB of dedicated data space for posting blocks to mainnet.

The extra space would create a separate fee market, allowing fees to be substantially lower while only a few rollups access the system. This means the early implementation would only improve scalability by a fraction of what is capable under sharding, but it would provide short term relief to current users of layer 2s.

Of course there are drawbacks to the implementation. First, rollup teams will have to make the switch from utilizing calldata under their current format to blob-style transactions after the upgrade. Also, the implementation would increase the size of the short-term execution payload, which could put mild stress on the network’s validators. Buterin has also suggested counter proposals that would bring short term relief to high rollup transaction fees, like EIP 4488, which would lower the costs for transactions using calldata instead of switching to a new type of transaction entirely.

However, once sharding is implemented the same rollups would still have to make this change to stay competitive with other layer 2s on transaction fees. Regardless, the increased load will be temporary because blob data would only need to be stored for 30 to 60 days before expiry. The upgrade would be a big first step in making Ethereum accessible, thereby eliminating one of the largest arguments against the network at the moment. Cheap fees into perpetuity may just be enough to take market share back from the alternative layer 1 ecosystems, but the fight for dominance is likely just getting started.

The following is an overview of network activity on the Ethereum Beacon Chain over the past week. For more information about the metrics featured in this section, check out our 101 explainer on Eth 2.0 metrics.

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