The Ordinals fever seems to be transferring to Ethereum. According to data from network activity, since yesterday a new type of registration is generating great demand for the blob space introduced by the Dencun update on March 13. In this sense, the number of transactions included in blobs increased dramatically, after the introduction of BlobScriptions, a new method for making inscriptions on Ethereum.
Blobs are a type of temporary memory that increases the rate of data included in Ethereum archive blocks, while increasing the network's versatility to process and register ERC-20 tokens and NFTs.
According to the analysis of the behavior of the blobs offered by a Dune forum user, known as Hildobby, 4,638 registrations were registered yesterday. Today the account is at 7,089, 50% of the daily capacity of the blobs and more than the transactions carried out in the second layers, Base, Arbitrium, Optimism and Line, at the time of writing this article.
As a consequence of this increase, blob (gas) rates skyrocketed yesterday and in 5 hours they had already reached 585 gwei or USD 18. Then maximums of up to USD 300 were recorded for each transaction. Blob fees have fallen sharply from their new high. At the time of this publication, blob fees are 49 gwei, equivalent to $2.1, according to Etherscan data.
However, since yesterday those same rates have been around 10 dollars, a fact that contrasts with what was observed in previous days, because since the Dencun update was executed, the gas necessary to carry out transactions on the network had been just cents on the dollar.
The inscriptions in question are a type of registration similar to that carried out in Bitcoin through the Ordinals protocol, by adding, in this case, arbitrary information in a field called calldata. This time, the Blobscriptions protocol is used , launched on March 27 and developed by Tom Lehman, known as Middlemarch, who also created Ethscriptions, another protocol that allows creating inscriptions directly on Ethereum.
The blob-related inscriptions emerged despite the fact that blobs are ephemeral and are deleted from the network after 18 days. However, full archive nodes can still maintain their data.
Another consequence of this activity on the Ethereum network has to do with how registrations, mainly of images at this time, are filling the limit capacity of the blobs.
The data highlights that there was a delay in the Ethereum mempool, where 160 blobs were waiting for processing. Ethereum can include only up to six blobs per block, indicating that this figure represents a delay 40 times greater than what can be accommodated in a single block, known as blob contention.
