L2 Metric Rundown

Given the recent debates about the Ethereum rollup-centric roadmap, I thought it would beneficial to give a rundown of the actual metrics L2s are producing. All data/charts are taken from Growthepie, a great source for everything about L2s.

Economics

The best argument against L2s has always been that the economics of a rollup-centric world doesn’t benefit ETH as an asset. Today, this is proving to be true.

The chart below depicts the media amount paid per transaction on an L2. The drop-off in April is courtesy of the introduction of blobs in the EIP-4844 upgrade.

In the last day, fees across Base, Arbitrum, and Optimism were $33,740, $6,3

always wondered why the base throughput chart look like a ladder. is it because the network reaches a throughput ceiling?

with this logic, the maximum theoretical gas throughput on the back of high demand stays the same until further network upgrades enable more throughput. post upgrade, the demand side will utilize this extra throughput until the ceiling is again reached, hence reaching a flat line after some growth.

regarding these 90% l2 profit margins. leaving aside the off-chain costs associated with running an l2, i’ll continue to run with the assumption that they’re relatively high. i’m wondering how much wiggle room a typical l2 team has over setting fees.

on one hand i assume teams can technically adjust fees to some extent, especially if they’re running such high margins.

on the other hand i assume fees are to some extent out of the control of the l2 team itself, due to either (1) demand spikes or (2) less optimized infra compared to other l2s increasing the cost of transactions, or (3) both supply and demand continue to grow significantly and as long as demand doesn’t drop, the fees are pressured.

what i’d like to better understand is per l2, who is keeping their transaction costs ‘artificially high’ and whose hand is forced by a variety of reasons, some of which i mentioned above.