At 9:55 pm Beijing time yesterday, the time slot height (Slot) of the Ethereum beacon chain (Beacon) officially reached 8626176, which is also the scheduled position for Dencun upgrade, and the upgrade was officially activated.

Regarding the content and impact of the Dencun upgrade, Odaily Planet Daily published an article in the previous article "The Cancun Upgrade is Finally Coming, What Targets Will It Benefit?" 》has been explained in detail. In short, the core content of the Dencun upgrade is EIP-4844. This upgrade aims to introduce a new transaction type "Blob transaction" to Ethereum by adding an additional The temporary data space Blob is specially used to process Layer2 related transactions, thereby significantly reducing the transaction fee cost of Layer2.

So, with the implementation of the upgrade, how much has the transaction cost of Layer 2 dropped?

Next, we will use real tests to compare the real gas change performance of the six mainstream Layer2s: Arbitrum, Optimism, Starknet, zkSync, Blast, and Base.

It should be emphasized that the Dencun upgrade itself will only be executed on the Ethereum main network. Therefore, if Layer 2 wants to achieve the fee reduction effect, it needs to actively upgrade to adapt to the new "Blob transaction", and different Layer 2 plans to adapt to the upgrade time. There are differences in aspects. All current Layer 2 fees have not been obvious for the time being. In this case, users still need to wait.

As shown in the figure above, as some Layer 2s have completed the adaptation of "Blob transactions", the gas costs of their respective networks have dropped significantly.

In addition, compared to ZK Rollup, the cost reduction of Optimistic Rollup after adaptation seems to be more obvious. Optimism, Base, etc. have almost been reduced to negligible levels - think about 1 US dollar now being clicked 100 times...

For now, Arbitrum is still the Layer 2 network with the smallest gas cost reduction, but since the team has stated that it will further reduce costs after the ArbOS Atlas upgrade on March 18, it hopes users will continue to be patient.

The last thing I want to talk about is the gas changes on the Ethereum main network. One of the major misunderstandings that many people have about the Dencun upgrade is that the upgrade will also reduce the gas cost of the Ethereum main network. This statement is obviously misunderstood, but it is not entirely unreasonable.

Because judging from the direct logic of the Dencun upgrade (mainly EIP-4844), the core purpose of the upgrade is to use the newly added Blob data space to reduce the cost of synchronizing data from Layer2 to Layer1 (Ethereum main network), thereby reducing the transaction fees of Layer2. , which is not directly related to the gas status of the Ethereum main network.

But indirectly, as the block space occupied by Layer 2 related transactions is released (actually transferred from calldate to Blob), the fee competition pressure faced by other Ethereum mainnet transactions will also be alleviated, so the Dencun upgrade will also be carried out to a certain extent. Significantly reduce the transaction fee cost of the Ethereum main network.

However, since Layer 2 related transactions account for a relatively limited share of the total transaction volume of the Ethereum main network, the gas impact of the above changes on the Ethereum main network will not be so obvious.

Overall, Layer 2 is still the biggest beneficiary of Dencun’s upgrade. With the significant reduction of on-chain gas, Layer 2's influence on projects with "high concurrency requirements" and "low unit value" attributes such as games and social networking will be greatly increased. Can this set off a new wave of Layer 2 application growth? This will be our focus in the next stage.