Ethereum’s Pectra fork adds dynamic blob fees to to improve L2 scaling
2024-10-18

Ethereum developers are set to implement an Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) to optimize blob-carrying transactions in a bid to improve network scalability in the upcoming Pectra fork.
EIP-7742 will create a mechanism for the Ethereum consensus layer to “dynamically” set the blob gas target and max values, Galaxy Digital’s vice president of research, Christine Kim, posted to X on Oct. 17 after attending Ethereum’s “All Core Devs” meeting.
Blobs are large, but temporary, chunks of data embedded in Ethereum transactions that aim to make Ethereum layer 2 transactions cheaper.
Kim said EIP-7742 should increase the currently fixed blob count — which Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stressed late last month was nearing full-capacity and could soon stall scalability.
“It's likely a blob count increase will also be included in pectra, and unlikely other changes to boost scalability like a gas limit or slot time change will be included in the upgrade,” Kim explained.
Ethereum developer Alex Stokes further explained on GitHub that increasing the blob parameters to have a more “flexible target value in relation to the blob max” should “reduce rigidity” from the currently fixed blob count.
The Pectra upgrade is expected to occur late this year or in early 2025.
Blobs were implemented via EIP-4844 on March 13 through the Dencun upgrade.
Another proposal, EIP-7623, could also free up more blob space by reducing the maximum Ethereum block size from 2.7 megabytes to approximately 1 megabyte.
The EIP’s inclusion in the upcoming fork ties in to Buterin’s vision of Ethereum’s mainnet and layer 2 blockchain’s achieving a combined 100,000 transactions per second through a component of Ethereum’s technical roadmap dubbed “The Surge.”
Cheap layer 2s may come at a literal cost
Opting to scale Ethereum transactions through layer 2s has resulted in a massive fall in the Ethereum mainnet’s share of total network revenue — which could hurt Ether’s (ETH) price over the long term, an industry analyst says.
The ratio of revenue between Ethereum and Ethereum layer 2s has been 10:90 over the last four months, Matthew Sigel, Head of Digital Asset Research of asset manager firm VanEck pointed out in an Oct. 17 X post.
It forced Sigel to revise VanEck’s bullish prediction that Ether would surpass $22,000 by 2030, which was estimated under the assumption of a 90:10 revenue split — the exact opposite of what’s happened over the last four months.
If that split were to remain the same, Sigel said VanEck’s Ether price target would fall 67% to $7,330.
It could get even worse too with one of Ethereum’s largest revenue drivers, decentralized exchange Uniswap, pivoting from Ethereum by creating its new layer 2 “Unichain.”
Ether is currently trading at $2,615, down 0.5% over the last 24 hours.