Following the successful implementation of the Dencun upgrade on Ethereum, transaction fees on the Starknet second layer have seen a significant drop from $1 to just 4 cents. The upgrade, which introduced temporary storage in blobs to scale second layers, has led to a notable decrease in fees across various layer-2 solutions.
Optimism, another prominent layer-2 platform, has also implemented blobs, seeing transaction fees plummeting to just 2 cents per transaction. Despite the fee reduction on layer-2 solutions, the fee burn on the Ethereum mainnet continues at a rate of about 3,500 ETH per day.
While the upgrade hasn’t significantly impacted base chain demand, it has enhanced utility in upper layers, paving the way for new use cases such as daily payments, gaming, and decentralised finance (DeFi) applications. The lower fees also make non-fungible tokens (NFTs) more appealing, contributing to broader adoption and usability of Ethereum’s ecosystem.
The decrease in transaction fees suggests a substantial increase in capacity, estimated to be around 20x for Starknet. This expanded capacity opens the door for welcoming new users to layer-2 solutions, driving optimism and leading to a positive market response. As a result, second layer tokens like STRK and ARB saw a 5% increase in anticipation of the upgrade, although they have since experienced a slight decline alongside Bitcoin. Nonetheless, the availability of 5 cent transactions indicates a renewed enthusiasm among users for utilising Ethereum’s layer-2 solutions.
