As Scroll gets more popular, here's a closer look at the data

We have talked a bit before about some of the Layer 2 networks on Ethereum that have been the most successful in the wake of the Dencun upgrade. In short, most rollups that have switched over to using blobs to store data on the mainnet as opposed to calldata are seeing a lot of savings. The big three major optimistic rollups have made this conversion, and popular ZK rollups like zkSync Era and Starknet have also moved over.

But there is some technical overhead to switching how you are posting data, so if it was not costing that much to publish data to Ethereum in the first place, you might not be in such a rush to convert over to blobs.

One network that was on the slower side to convert to blobs was Scroll, a ZK rollup that launched last October. Scroll is one of the larger ZK rollup players, being the fifth largest by TVL and third largest by daily activity, but in the overall scaling network space, it was not that popular.

Scroll did announce on April 16 plans to start supporting blob data with its Bernoulli upgrade, scheduled to go live on mainnet on April 29, but for now it has become the rollup with the most expensive data publishing costs.

Prior to February of this year, Scroll accounted for less than 10% of the fees across rollups to publish data on Ethereum, but now it accounts for roughly 50%. So far in April, Scroll has spent 837.6 ETH publishing data on Ethereum, while all other rollups combined have spent around 820 ETH.

The primary reason for this shift is that the biggest spenders have now slashed their spending, but Scroll also seems to have gotten more popular. March was the highest month on record for Scroll spending at 2,510 ETH, indicating the rollup had to publish more data.

In March, there were 11 days in a row where the network had over 400,000 transactions, a new record for sustained activity at that level. While the number of transactions has come down now, it still remains elevated compared to earlier in 2024.

Of course, when Scroll does launch its new upgrade, it will no longer be the Layer 2 spending the most to publish Ethereum data, which is maybe not such a good title to have anyway. However, its recent growth has become more noticeable since it's still continuing to use calldata to post transaction summaries.

This is an excerpt from The Block's Data & Insights newsletter. Dig into the numbers making up the industry’s most thought-provoking trends.