I still remember when rollup fees used to be a problem subtly.. you’d bridge to arbitrum/optimism thinking you were escaping mainnet gas, then pay $1.20 per tx anyway, lol.
Then march 2024 happened, EIP-4844 (proto-danksharding).
Ethereum quietly flipped a switch, and everything about rollup economics changed overnight.
For the first time, L2s could post data as blobs instead of calldata.
It may have sounded small but it’s the biggest thing to happen to scaling since rollups themselves.
Calldata sits permanently onchain, expensive storage, high fees.
Blobs, on the other hand, are temporary data containers (kept for about 18 days), they store what rollups need to prove validity but don’t clog the mainnet.
That small design tweak cut L2 data costs by 60–90% immediately.
@arbitrum transactions dropped from approx $0.30 to $0.05, @base became cheaper than polygon’s PoS chain.
Even @zksync and Linea with their heavier zk proofs, started feeling “mainnet-like,” but faster.
and then, as you will guess, suddenly something clicked.
Rollups weren’t just scaling infrastructure anymore, they were economic zones.
When transaction costs drop that low, activity explodes.
More trades, more mints, more app flows and that means more sequencer revenue, more fees recycled into their own ecosystems.
You could actually see it onchain:
➤ @arbitrum sequencer revenue hit all time highs post-4844.
➤ @optimism’s OP Stack chains (like base and mode) started generating consistent protocol fees.
➤ even smaller rollups like @blast or @Linea saw record tx counts.
The “blob moment” made rollups sustainable not just technically, but economically, it made them self-reinforcing systems:
cheap data → more users → more volume → more fees → more devs → more chains.
Ethereum didn’t just scale throughput, it created space for economies to form.
And for the first time since the rollup thesis began, it feels like scaling is real, not theoretical.
The post-blob world isn’t hype anymore, it’s the foundation of the modular era we’re stepping into.

Tagging some DeFi chads so you don’t miss out on anything related
@eli5_defi, @Mars_DeFi, @crypto_linn, @haylesdefi, @TheDeFiKenshin, @Hercules_Defi, @Haylesdefi, @_SmokinTed, @thelearningpill, @Nick_Researcher, @tomwanhh, @0xCheeezzyyyy, @yashasedu, @RubiksWeb3hub, @monosarin, @Defi_Warhol, @kenodnb, @twindoges, @0xfreestyler.
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