One of the last major layer 2s made the conversion from calldata to blobs last week.

Blast is a relatively new optimistic rollup but it gained a lot of traction initially for supporting native yield. While the mainnet launched in February, early access started back in November 2023, which allowed users to deposit but not withdraw. However, bridging over earned Blast Points naturally allowed the platform to amass over $1 billion in total value locked before launching. There were also some critiques of the invite rewards structure, which received a lot of “Ponzi scheme” allegations. 

Yet Blast is open to the public now. While there's been no airdrop yet, it's still a layer 2 that captures the public’s attention by being backed by Paradigm, created by the founder of NFT marketplace Blur, and of course, offering a yield opportunity.

It is also home to one of the most trendy crypto protocols, fantasy.top, which allows users to trade crypto influencer trading cards. Earlier this month, it was in the top 10 platforms by daily fees generated, although revenues have slowed.

In terms of activity, Blast is still not as popular as Arbitrum. It launched just as Base was getting its second wave of popularity, so it has lagged behind the Coinbase-backed optimistic rollup as well. Its daily transaction levels are typically in line with Optimism, around 500,000 per day, which is still impressive for a newer network.

But regardless of usage, it was beneficial for all layer 2s to start using blobs over calldata to post transaction summaries since it provides a much cheaper means of data storage. Fees on Blast were not that high after the initial hype faded, with the median transaction fee on the rollup typically staying below $0.10 in the days leading up to the blob upgrade on May 27.

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Since the transition, the median transaction fee has not exceeded $0.01, making Blast one of the cheapest layer 2s available.

Blast is posting a sizable number of blobs per day, trending between 700 and 1,000 per day, putting it behind Aribtrum, Base, Optimism, Taiko, and Scroll but ahead of Linea and other ZK rollup networks.

But Blast is the third most dominant network in terms of blob transactions posted to the Ethereum mainnet since it only posts one blob per transaction. You can see in this transaction that Blast only posted one blob, whereas Optimism posted six in this one. It is more cost-effective to post more blobs within one transaction to mitigate transaction fees, and it is common to see some of the larger rollups using the six blobs per transaction maximum. Freshly launched Taiko and Scroll also seem to be using one blob per transaction for now.

It could be a temporary setup, as Blast adjusts to posting blob transactions before they start batching more blobs together, but it seems Blast is already passing on very cheap fees to users without the bundling.

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