Yona Gushiken
The long-awaited Dencun upgrade on Ethereum appears to have fulfilled its promise of significantly slashing gas fees on layer 2 networks — within a short time after its launch Wednesday.
But this was hardly enough to stir up much excitement among Shibarium users, who have been relishing low gas fees ever since the launch of the Shiba Inu layer-2 scalability solution last year.
Upon activation, the Dencun upgrade ushered in a new era for Layer 2 chains that adopted blobs—a groundbreaking technology designed to optimize L2 transaction data storage on Ethereum. This innovation is particularly beneficial for rollups, which rely on storing their data in transaction call data. Before Dencun, this method posed limitations on size and data storage, necessitating continuous validator operation.
Following the implementation of Dencun upgrade, data from multiple Layer2s like OP Mainnet, Base, Zora, Starknet and zkSync, all suggested a remarkable reduction in transaction fees by several folds. The median gas fees on Base stood at around $0.5 before the Dencun upgrade and plummeted to just about $0.0012 after the update was implemented, data by Markov on Dune showed.
Similar trends were observed across other Layer 2 networks within the Optimism ecosystem, with Optimism’s average transaction fee dropping to $0.05 and Base’s average transaction fee to $0.064 post-upgrade. Meanwhile, Arbitrum’s average transaction fee is $0.5 and a median fee of $0.3553, while zkSync Era has an average transaction fee of $0.161 and a median fee of $0.0936.
Even so, variables like computational complexity, network congestion, and several other factors mean the upgrade’s effect on individual transaction fee differs.
While these L2s have had to wait for the Dencun upgrade to reduce their gas or transaction fees, Shibarium users have already been enjoying low transaction fees since the network’s launch in August 2023.
One user who uses the X handle @Digarch shared with The Daily Shib an impressively low swap transaction fee on the platform of 0.000140690604372705 BONE, or around $0.0001, in their swap transaction done on the platform very recently, illustrating the cost-effectiveness Shibarium has offered users.
It’s crucial to note that while the Dencun upgrade is designed to revolutionize rollups, its influence on Shibarium will be limited. Shibarium operates as a sidechain, uniquely processing transactions by transmitting the transaction’s root hash to Ethereum and utilizing checkpoints, distinguishing its operational model from those directly impacted by Dencun’s enhancements.
