The fee floor shifts in Ethereum’s blob market

The September average blob fee is 2.3 gwei. This figure exceeds the post-Dencun baseline. EIP-7918, part of the Fusaka upgrade in December 2025, set a minimum price to stop the network from subsidizing rollups. Before this, fees sat near 1 wei. Now, fees move between 0.01 Gwei and 0.5 Gwei.

The era ended.

The Pectra upgrade in May 2025 increased the target to 6 blobs and the maximum to 9 blobs. This change increased daily capacity from 5.5GB to 8.15GB. Rollups purchased 25,600 blobs daily in the five days after Pectra went live. This compared to 21,200 blobs daily before the upgrade. The daily data capacity rose from 2.7GB to 3.3GB. Because the new minimum price for blobs matches the actual verification cost, the previous period of near-zero fees ended once demand pushed the average toward 2.3 gwei this month. Even with increased purchasing, the average number of blobs per block stays 33% below the new target of 6. At the target rate, the network sells 5.45GB of space per day. Blobs were 86% full on average post-Pectra. A rise in Ethereum layer 1 fees aided in keeping costs elevated. The L1 base fee increased more than 650% week-over-week after Pectra activation.

Rollup economics

Rollups saw higher margins after Pectra. Base earned $1.22 million in net income. Blast saw its margin expand from the high 50% range to over 80%. Linea maintained a 98.86% margin.

Base earns the most.

Rollups pay for the full 128KB capacity even if they use less. In the 60 days before Pectra, rollups paid a daily average of $16,250 in blob fees. This fell to less than one thousandth of a penny daily after Pectra. Since Pectra, rollups have purchased 20.8% more blobs daily than they did pre-upgrade. Total daily costs for purchasing and executing blobs fell 51% after Pectra. This includes a 71% decline in ETH burned from rollup data posting. Currently, 99.99% of the burned ETH comes from base fees of type-3 execution layer transactions. You should watch if these margins shrink as the 2.3 gwei average persists. Base saw a 224% rise in transaction volume after the fee reduction. In the 150 days after Dencun, rollups purchased 2,225,958 blobs at an average cost of $1.59 per blob. In November 2024, the blob base fee spiked to $80 per blob submission. Optimistic rollups like Arbitrum and Optimism process transactions for cents. In 2021, fees for mints reached $100.

Node storage loads

Nodes hold rollup data for 18 days. The Pectra upgrade increased daily capacity from 5.5GB to 8.15GB. This increase forces consensus nodes to manage more data. In May 2025, nodes held 44.6GB of unpruned data. If current demand continues, nodes must carry 60GB. PeerDAS, introduced in the Fusaka upgrade, allows nodes to check only small samples of data. PeerDAS uses Reed-Solomon erasure coding to split extended blob data into 128 columns distributed across dedicated gossip subnets. Nodes subscribe to only 8 of these 128 subnets. This reduces the load on node operators. The retention period is 4,096 epochs.

The data grows.

Can nodes handle the 95GB to 100GB load required at the target rate?