Thomas Daniels
The team behind Arbitrum is poised to revolutionize layer-2 transaction fees, promising a dramatic tenfold decrease effective March 18. This milestone achievement comes courtesy of Offchain Labs, who have successfully rolled out an enhancement to ArbOS, affectionately dubbed Atlas. This update ushers in support for blob transactions, a strategic move aimed at slashing the expenses associated with data transfers from Layer 2 back to the Ethereum main network.
Earning widespread acclaim from the Arbitrum community, the Atlas initiative signifies a major leap forward, with many of the upgrade’s components activated just a day prior. Offchain Labs anticipates this will lead to a staggering drop in the base fee rate, from 0.1 Gwei down to 0.01 Gwei, translating into a reduction in costs for users from around $0.5 to a mere $0.05 for the same operation.
In the wake of the Dencun update, other layer-2 solutions like Optimism and Base have also seen remarkable enhancements in gas efficiency. Post-update, the Base protocol witnessed a precipitous fall in gas fees, from $0.31 to an almost negligible $0.0005. Similarly, Optimism has seen transaction costs plummet to under $0.01, as reported by L2Fees.
These advancements follow closely on the heels of the Dencun update’s activation on the Ethereum mainnet on March 13, which introduced a groundbreaking enhancement in the form of EIP-4844. This essential upgrade, by facilitating a new type of transaction for blobs, is set not only to decimate layer-2 transaction costs by tenfold but also to significantly boost the overall throughput of Ethereum.
