Ethereum inscriptions drive blobs to meet limit! 🚀🔥

Unleashing the Power of Blobs on Ethereum 🚀

The rate of transactions involving blobs on Ethereum is skyrocketing, surpassing the network’s designated capacity. This surge follows the deployment of inscriptions on blobs, a new feature that has sparked a heightened demand for blob usage.

The Dencun Upgrade: Revolutionizing Layer 2 Transactions

Ethereum core developers recently rolled out the Dencun upgrade, which introduced blobs to make Layer 2 transactions more cost-effective. This upgrade has proven successful by enabling Layer 2s to leverage blobs instead of the traditional “calldata” method for processing transactions. This shift has paved the way for reduced fees, allowing for cost savings to be passed on to end users.

Introduction of inscriptions on blobs
Impact on demand for blob utilization
Stress testing the blob feature with inscriptions

The Rise of Inscriptions on Blobs

However, the recent incorporation of inscriptions on blobs has started to stress-test the feature. These inscriptions, inspired by Bitcoin Ordinals, create unique fungible and non-fungible artifacts that are integrated into blob transactions.

Analyzing blob transactions trends
Shift towards inscriptions
Comparison with other Ethereum Layer 2s

Facing Capacity Constraints

Analysis from a Dune Analytics dashboard curated by Hildobby reveals a striking trend: 40% of blob transactions are now associated with inscriptions. This marks the highest utilization of blobs among various Ethereum Layer 2 solutions such as Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, and Linea.

Full capacity utilization of blobs
Backlog in mempool
Challenges with processing pending blobs

Addressing the Backlog

The surge in interest and utilization has pushed blobs to operate at full capacity, with a 100% utilization rate observed. This heightened demand has resulted in a significant backlog in the mempool, where 160 blobs are awaiting processing according to data from EtherNow. With Ethereum’s current limit of including only six blobs per block, the backlog is 40 times higher than what can be accommodated in a single block, leading to what is known as blob contention.