Ethereum ‘BlobScriptions’ lift off and it’s taking Blob fees with it

A new method for inscribing data on Ethereum blobs is wreaking havoc on fees for the data-saving feature.

A viral new method for minting data to the Ethereum blockchain dubbed “BlobScriptions” is pushing up the price of Blob fees — the amount required for a blob to be included in an Ethereum block. 

BlobScriptions were introduced on March 27 by a protocol called Ethscriptions, allowing users to inscribe data — from JPEGs to text — directly onto “blobs,” which were introduced to the Ethereum network as part of the network’s Dencun upgrade on March 13.

Less than five hours after the introduction of BlobScriptions, the gas fees for Blobs soared as high as 585 gwei — equivalent to roughly $18, according to data from Ultrasound.money.

This was a far cry from the average gas price for minting data on a blob before BlobScriptions, which averaged around one wei, equivalent to a tiny fraction of $0.01.

However, Blob fees have since fallen considerably from its newly notched high. At the time of publication, blob fees are running at 35.8 gwei, equivalent to $1.20, per Coinbrain conversion data.

Meanwhile, users have made over 4,500 inscriptions on blobs since the introduction of BlobScriptions, according to Dune Analytics data.

In a March 27 post to X, Ethscriptions founder Tom Lehman — who goes by the alias Middlemarch — noted the spiking cost of “blobspace,” and urged users to mint BlobScriptions via the official blobscription protocol.

Much in a similar way to the early days of Bitcoin Ordinals, Ethereum users are opting to mint small pieces of text and seemingly random assortments of images to blobs, with the most recent activity on blobscription.io showing hundreds of new images added in the last few hours.

Notably, blob data is only stored on Ethereum nodes for around 18 days meaning that after that period, BlobScriptions data will be removed from the network. However, Lehman added that the Ethscriptions indexer would store the data “indefinitely.”

Related: Starknet targets increased throughput, lower fees with parallel transactions in 2024

Blobs were introduced by way of EIP-4844 — a core data-saving feature of Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade — which was focused primarily on reducing transaction costs on layer-2 networks by a significant margin.

Transaction fees on Ethereum L2s fell drastically following the Dencun upgrade, with swap fees on Arbitrum plunging from around $1.25 to below $0.02, while Polygon fees fell by a similar amount.

As a way of lauding the decreased fees that came with blobs, one developer Ethereum managed to mint the entire script of the Bee Movie on an Ethereum blob less than 15 minutes after the upgrade went live all for less than $13 in ETH gas fees.