In brief
- After Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade, blob transaction costs dropped from ~$16,000 daily to a fraction of a penny, making layer-2 networks significantly cheaper to operate.
- Despite blob usage increasing 33%, rollups haven’t fully utilized the expanded capacity.
- The increased data burden from cheaper blobs is forcing smaller validators to merge with larger operations, however.
A month after the Pectra upgrade, key indicators on Ethereum have begun to reveal the promise and pitfalls of the network’s most ambitious technical overhaul since the 2022 “merge.”
One of the major features that the Pectra upgrade brought was expanding the Ethereum blockchain’s capacity for handling “blobs,” which are units of “ephemeral data storage,” helping keep larger amounts of it on the consensus layer, according to a definition from the Protocol developer team.
A blob is a dedicated data structure that can store larger amounts of data. More blobs means transactions, layer-2 networks, and rollup operations could get even cheaper.
“The near-zero cost of blobs has been a major unlock for Ethereum scalability,” Ulyana Skladchikova, head of product at open-source multi-chain explorer Blockscout, told Decrypt.
The same aspect has made it “more cost-efficient for layer-2s to post data and enable high-throughput, low-cost rollups to flourish,” she explained.
Those high-throughput and low-cost rollups include popular networks like the Coinbase-incubated Base, Arbitrum, and Optimism, which can now process thousands of transactions for pennies instead of dollars.
For Ethereum, this means that it is “delivering on its modular vision” that could provide “real benefits already visible across L2 ecosystems,” Skladchikova said.
Blobs got cheaper
A week after the Pectra upgrade, rollups like Base and Arbitrum were paying less than a fraction of a penny for transactions on a daily basis.
“Blobs are virtually free again, for the first time since mid-April 2025,” Zack Pokorny, research analyst at digital asset firm Galaxy, wrote in a May 15 report.
Since Pectra went live, the total had tallied just “four-thousandths of a penny,” Pokorny noted, comparing it to roughly $16,000 daily before the Pectra upgrade, according to data from their Dune dashboard for blobs.
The component responsible for this was EIP-7691, which introduced blob scaling on Pectra. In the days following Pectra’s activation, blob usage increased by about 20%, with daily blob purchases rising to 25,600.
Still, despite the increase, rollups haven’t yet fully utilized the expanded capacity. That’s resulted in a substantial drop in blob prices, Pokorny explained.
By the end of May, blob usage had increased to roughly 28,000, representing a 33% increase since Pectra went live, aggregate data compiled by crypto intelligence firm Coin Metrics shows.
Validator consolidation
While the reduction in blob costs improved profit margins for rollups, it also presented challenges for validators.
The cost improvements on blobs indirectly increased “the data burden on validators,” Blockscout’s Skladchikova told Decrypt. Still, this can be seen as a trade-off, she argued.
Validators are people or organizations that help run Ethereum by keeping it secure and processing transactions. They do this by locking up some of their own ETH as a deposit—this is called “staking.” In return, they can earn ETH rewards. But if the hardware they’re using to help validate transactions goes offline too often or breaks the rules, then they can lose some of the ETH they staked.
Because some smaller validators may not be able to afford the new costs of processing more data without risking a penalty, they’ve been merging into larger operations that can handle both the higher stake limits and the growing storage burden.
“Validator consolidation often raises concerns about centralization,” Skladchikova said, “but in Ethereum’s case, the effect may actually be decentralizing.”
The price of Ethereum saw a wild upswing in May, surging from a price around $1,800 at the start of the month to a peak near $2,800. Even down slightly to $2,510, as of this writing, ETH remains up 27% over the last 30 days.
Edited by Stacy Elliott.
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