Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade goes live: how it impacts L2 gas fees

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Ethereum (ETH) successfully implemented the Dencun upgrade this Wednesday, which is set to lower gas fees for its layer-2 (L2) blockchains. The reduction is made possible by spaces reserved on Ethereum blocks called ‘blobs’, which will store transaction data sent by the L2 networks.

Stani Kulechov, the creator of Aave Protocol and CEO of Avara, stated that this upgrade will provide accessibility to end-users through lower fees, especially for decentralized finance (DeFi) application users. “By reducing these barriers, Dencun paves the way for innovation, adoption, and growth of Ethereum,” he adds.

Edward Wilson, from on-chain data firm Nansen, also highlighted the step towards accessibility that the Dencun upgrade represents. “By reducing these barriers, Dencun sets the stage for enhanced innovation, adoption, and growth across the Ethereum ecosystem.”

However, the decrease in Ethereum’s L2 gas fees is not guaranteed, since the teams behind those projects must adapt to the changes brought by Dencun, explains Bruno Moniz, blockchain engineer at Brazilian digital bank Inter. Thus, not all layer-2 blockchains based on Ethereum might show lower fees in the next hours.

“This involves the following steps, which I imagine devs are being implemented by devs: modify the rollup transaction data structure to include references to the data in blobs, using the new fields introduced by EIP-4844, such as ‘blob versioned hashes’ and ‘blob kzg commitments’; adjusting the transaction processing logic to verify and access the referenced blob data, using the new opcodes and functions determined in EIP-4844, like ‘BLOBVERIFY’ and ‘BLOBREAD’; implementing mechanisms to ensure the availability of blob data during the necessary period for the finalization of rollup transactions; completely updating the off-chain infrastructure to handle the storage and efficient retrieval of data blobs.”

Moniz highlights that most of the largest L2 is working closely with Ethereum’s core developers team to guarantee a smooth transaction. Nevertheless, Blast faced a downtime of over two hours related to the Dencun upgrade, its official account reported via an X (formerly Twitter) post.

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