Ethereum’s transition to blob-carrying transactions with EIP-4844 introduced a new class of ephemeral data availability. Since day one, one of Blobscan’s goals has been to preserve this data beyond Ethereum’s native retention window, ensuring blobs remain accessible long after they disappear from the consensus layer.

Over the past years, we’ve operated archival infrastructure for Ethereum mainnet, Gnosis and multiple testnets, storing and serving blobs for public access.

As Ethereum blobs adoption and Blobscan have grown, so have the operational costs of long-term blob retention. At the same time, we've come to believe that preserving Ethereum's blob history shouldn't depend on a single centralized storage provider.

Today, we’re announcing the next step in Blobscan’s evolution: a migration toward a fully IPFS-backed blob archive.

This migration also comes with some changes to our storage policy that will help keep the project sustainable while allowing us to focus our resources where they matter most.

This decision is driven by two factors.

First, operating long-term blob archives on our current centralized storage provider (Google Cloud) has become increasingly expensive. While storage itself represents a cost, egress has become one of the largest recurring expenses of serving public blob data.

We previously wrote about the economics and operational challenges of maintaining Ethereum blob archives in Blobscan: The Cost of Archiving Ethereum’s Blob Data

Second, actual usage patterns are heavily concentrated on Ethereum mainnet. Compared to mainnet, Sepolia and Hoodi receive very little traffic on both the explorer and the API. By far, the overwhelming majority of Blobscan usage today comes from Ethereum mainnet.

By reducing infrastructure commitments for low-usage networks, we can continue investing in the infrastructure that provides the most value while ensuring Blobscan remains sustainable for the long term.

Starting July 3, 2026, Blobscan will no longer provide guaranteed archival storage for the Sepolia and Hoodi networks.

After this date:

• Blobscan will no longer guarantee long-term availability of Sepolia and Hoodi blobs.

• Blobs will continue to be stored in our IPFS infrastructure on a best-effort basis, but they will not be pinned by Blobscan (at least for now).

• Blob downloads will continue to be available through our IPFS Gateway whenever the data is still present in the cluster.

• Google Cloud download URLs for all networks are not guaranteed after July 3, 2026. Blob downloads will progressively transition to our IPFS Gateway, which becomes the canonical way to retrieve blob data.

This does not mean we’re dropping support for these networks.

We will continue running the indexers and maintaining the explorer, analytics, charts, and API for both Sepolia and Hoodi exactly as before. Only the long-term preservation guarantees are changing.

Blobscan is transitioning away from centralized object storage and toward IPFS as the canonical storage and distribution layer for Ethereum blob data.

Effective immediately:

• Every archived blob is imported into the Blobscan IPFS cluster.

• Blob pages and the API expose each blob’s IPFS CID.

• Ethereum mainnet blobs are pinned, ensuring long-term preservation.

• Sepolia and Hoodi blobs are stored without pinning and are therefore available on a best-effort basis.

Starting July 31, 2026, Blobscan will stop serving blob downloads from Google Cloud.

From that point onward:

• Blob downloads will be served through the Blobscan IPFS Gateway.

• The IPFS CID becomes the canonical way to retrieve blob data.

This migration significantly reduces both storage costs and, more importantly, bandwidth and egress costs, while removing our dependency on centralized storage providers.

Our commitment to Ethereum mainnet and Gnosis is unchanged.

Every Ethereum mainnet and Gnosis blob archived by Blobscan is:

• 📌 Pinned in the Blobscan IPFS cluster.

• 💾 Replicated across our archival infrastructure.

• 🔗 Accessible through its IPFS CID.

• Guaranteed to remain available for long-term retrieval.

Our long-term vision is for blob preservation to become a decentralized public-good infrastructure rather than a service operated by a single organization.

Over the coming months, we’ll continue expanding our IPFS cluster with community-operated nodes, allowing independent operators to contribute storage and replication capacity for Ethereum blob history.

We’ll publish documentation explaining how anyone can join the network.

This migration marks an important milestone for Blobscan.

Instead of investing in increasingly larger centralized storage systems, we’re investing in a decentralized preservation network built on IPFS.

Our priorities for the coming months are:

• 🚀 Complete the migration to a fully IPFS-backed archive.

• 🌍 Expand the Blobscan IPFS cluster with community operators.

• 💡 Explore new long-term funding models beyond grants.

Blobscan has always been built as open infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem.

Like many public-good projects, grants alone are not enough to ensure long-term sustainability. As those funding opportunities become increasingly limited, community support becomes more important than ever.

If Blobscan has been useful to you or your organization, you can help us continue preserving Ethereum blob history by supporting the project.

You can support Blobscan by:

• 💜 Making a donation on our new Giveth page.

• 🌍 Running an IPFS node once we open participation in the Blobscan IPFS cluster.

• 📣 Sharing Blobscan with developers, researchers, and the broader Ethereum community.

Thank you for helping us build a more decentralized and resilient future for Ethereum blob data.