an hour of ethereum's blob space cost $1.94. who bought it
blobwatch reads every block of the last hour, prices each blob from its block header and groups the blobs by the rollup that posted them. this run covers tuesday, 10:21 to 11:21 utc, 297 blocks. the whole hour of blob space, for every rollup on ethereum together, cost 0.00078 eth. at $2,481 an ether that is $1.94.
the hour
| blocks | 297 (25,982,236 to 25,982,532) |
| blobs | 1,576 · 5.3 per block |
| the schedule | bpo2: target 14, max 21 per block |
| blocks with no blob · full blocks | 40 · 0 |
| blob base fee | 0.0030 to 0.0057 gwei, median 0.0037 |
| paid for all blobs | 0.00078 eth · $1.94 |
that is 5.3 blobs a block against a target of 14. the blob fee has one rule: above target the price rises, below it the price falls, down to a floor. it sat at the floor all hour, and the weekly note has it at the floor all week, median 0.0036 gwei over 50,400 blocks. demand could grow two and a half times before the price moved.
who bought it
| poster | blobs | share | txs | per tx | paid |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| robinhood chain | 384 | 24.4% | 128 | 3.0 | $0.47 |
| base | 348 | 22.1% | 58 | 6.0 | $0.42 |
| op mainnet | 245 | 15.5% | 49 | 5.0 | $0.30 |
| unlabeled 0x002b..9449 | 100 | 6.3% | 25 | 4.0 | $0.12 |
| arbitrum one | 72 | 4.6% | 24 | 3.0 | $0.09 |
| world chain | 65 | 4.1% | 13 | 5.0 | $0.08 |
| ink | 60 | 3.8% | 10 | 6.0 | $0.07 |
| sent to multicall3 | 49 | 3.1% | 49 | 1.0 | $0.06 |
| soneium | 35 | 2.2% | 7 | 5.0 | $0.04 |
| unichain | 27 | 1.7% | 9 | 3.0 | $0.03 |
| katana | 22 | 1.4% | 9 | 2.4 | $0.03 |
| zk stack chain 36900 | 16 | 1.0% | 8 | 2.0 | $0.02 |
| metal l2 | 15 | 1.0% | 15 | 1.0 | $0.02 |
| lighter | 14 | 0.9% | 14 | 1.0 | $0.02 |
| hemi | 12 | 0.8% | 12 | 1.0 | $0.01 |
| starknet | 12 | 0.8% | 2 | 6.0 | $0.01 |
robinhood chain posts more blobs than base. it is an arbitrum orbit chain with chain id 4663; blobwatch found the name by asking its inbox contract for its bridge, the bridge for its rollup and the rollup for its chain id, because nobody had written the inbox down. it sends 3 blobs per transaction, 128 transactions in the hour, one every 2.3 blocks. base sends 6 per transaction and needs 58. op mainnet, 245 blobs, is third.
the inbox 0x002b…9449 posted 100 blobs and is still the biggest poster without a name; the issue is open, and if you know whose it is, that is the place. the 49 blobs sent to multicall3 came in 49 transactions from unrelated senders sharing one contract, one blob each; that looks like individuals, and i do not know yet what they post. starknet is the other end of the table, 2 transactions in the hour with 6 blobs each, the largest batches and the fewest.
what it costs
1,576 blobs at a median blob base fee of 0.0037 gwei. robinhood chain paid $0.47 for its 384 blobs, base $0.42. the same transactions also pay execution gas for the calldata that carries the blob commitments; that column needs --receipts and it is a separate number, larger than this one when the base fee is up. the blob space itself cost the rollups on ethereum under two dollars for the hour, all of them together.
rerun it
blobwatch --since 1h --jsonpython 3.10+, standard library, one public node. a full block is about half a megabyte, so an hour is around 150 megabytes of download and took two and a half minutes on my connection. the names come from a table with a source on every row, or from the chain itself; "origin" in the json says which.
none of it is advice. if a name in the table is wrong, the source field in the json says where it came from, and i want to hear about it.
