Can modifying Blob’s pricing mechanism really help ETH break through its difficulties?

Author: NingNing

Before the Cancun upgrade, L2's peak Gas consumption accounted for 15.5% of the total Gas of the Ethereum mainnet, and was above 10% for most of the time; after the Cancun upgrade, L2's Gas consumption ratio was halved and halved again, and has been fluctuating slightly around 1% since August.

In order to respond to Celestia's DA price war and based on optimistic expectations for the explosive growth of application-based Rollups, the Cancun upgrade EIP4844 added a dedicated block space Blob to store L2 state data, and also aimed to reduce the DA fees paid by L2 in the design of the Blob pricing mechanism.

For example, the Base Fee of the Blob space market is priced at 1 Wei. When there is insufficient space, the Gas fee of each block is increased by 12.5%, which makes it difficult to form an effective pricing for Blob space.

What is even more unexpected is that the expected explosive growth of application-based Rollup has come to an abrupt halt.

These two points have jointly led to the current situation where the Ethereum mainnet is bleeding to subsidize L2. Therefore, some people in the Ethereum community have begun to call for the modification of Blob's pricing mechanism, imposing more DA taxes on L2, destroying more ETH, and returning Ethereum's supply to a deflationary state.

What do you think of these voices from the Ethereum community? Personally, I think this is indeed a shortcut to enhance Ethereum's value capture capabilities compared to restoring the leading position of the stablecoin payment network and revitalizing the monopoly of the Ethereum mainnet in the long-tail asset issuance and trading market. But as the community's opposition voices say, it is a bit too eager for quick success and it is not a good thing to let the short-term fluctuations of the secondary market tokens excessively affect the development direction of the protocol.

For some reason, compared with other PoS public chain communities, the Ethereum community has a morbid and mysterious love for deflation, and subconsciously correlates deflation with the rise in coin prices. But in fact, after the halving, the actual annualized inflation rate of Bitcoin is also 0.84%. The annualized inflation rate of the native tokens of other mainstream PoS L1 (Solana, Polkadot, Cosmos) is generally between 7% and 15%.

Between the simple thing and the right thing, we should choose the right thing; between the narrow gate of long-termism and the wide gate of short-term gains, we should choose the narrow gate. In short, the future of Ethereum lies in the new round of application layer innovations triggered by technical iterations such as chain abstraction, EOA address smart wallet, modularization, single block confirmation, etc., and not in levying more DA taxes at the moment.