On Wednesday morning, Ethscriptions, a website, introduced a method for minting inscriptions on EIP-4844 blobs, which are efficient data packets introduced in Ethereum’s recent Dencun upgrade.
Similar to other blockchains with inscription capabilities, the rise of so-called BlobScriptions has significantly increased the price of blockspace — or, in this case, blobspace.
Following the Dencun upgrade, the base fee for a blob was set at one wei, an Ethereum-denominated price equivalent to a fraction of $0.01.
Today, the blob base fee surged above 500 gwei, as reported by ultrasound.money. One gwei is equivalent to a billion wei.
As of the current writing, the blob fee is approximately 6 gwei, representing a staggering 60 trillion percent increase from the one wei cost since the Dencun upgrade. At six gwei, the fee is around $0.20, according to CoinBrain.
It’s worth noting that despite the substantial increase, the blob fee remains lower than the gas price on Ethereum’s layer-1, which stands at approximately 37 gwei, according to Etherscan.
However, even at one wei, blob space was effectively free, according to Blocknative CEO Matt Cutler. The current Blob Base Fee, measured in gwei, is far from free.
Inscriptions, which have regained popularity on Bitcoin recently, offer a cost-effective way to embed art or potential tokens on a blockchain. With BlobScriptions, a plethora of images and tokens are now being inscribed on blobs.
Importantly, blob data is retained by Ethereum nodes for only about 18 days to facilitate transaction verification on layer-2s. Thus, BlobScriptions will disappear from Ethereum after this period. However, they will still be stored in the indexer for the Ethscriptions protocol, according to co-founder Tom Lehman.
And of course our Ethscriptions indexer will store them indefinitely
— Middlemarch (@dumbnamenumbers) March 27, 2024
In the hours leading up to press time, 41% of created blobs were inscription mints, according to a Dune dashboard. In comparison, popular layer-2s Arbitrum, Base, and Optimism each accounted for approximately 9% of blobs during the same period.
Lehman explained that the goal of using blobs for inscriptions was to provide an alternative to expensive smart contracts for data storage, enabling ordinary individuals, not just large layer-2s, to benefit from EIP-4844 blobs.
On Wednesday afternoon, Ethereum also experienced an increase in missed slots, with some researchers attributing it to blob inscriptions, although there was disagreement on this matter.
13% of slots the past hour have been missed.https://t.co/KCVfisF5GV https://t.co/FLlcFFK5T3 pic.twitter.com/RifGUV95CN
— Data Always (@Data_Always) March 27, 2024
Regardless, the rise of blob inscriptions could disrupt the low-fee environment that layer-2s have enjoyed in recent weeks. Whether this trend is temporary or here to stay remains to be seen, as Cutler pondered.
