After the Dencun upgrade (EIP-4844) introduced blobs — Ethereum’s new data-availability market for Layer-2 rollups — the network achieved one of its greatest technical milestones in years: a ten-fold improvement in scalability.
But economically, Dencun also created an imbalance.

The new blob market functioned too well from an efficiency standpoint and too poorly from a pricing one. Within days of launch, blob fees collapsed to near zero, remaining there for months. Rollups could publish large amounts of data essentially for free, while Ethereum burned almost nothing from blob usage.
This meant the network had massive throughput but almost no economic capture — a form of demand that no longer contributed meaningfully to ETH’s monetary policy.

EIP-7918, titled “Blob base fee bounded by execution cost,” is the first proposal that directly addresses this imbalance. Rather than changing blob supply or bandwidth, it reintroduces a dynamic price floor tied to the execution base fee — ensuring that blob users always pay at least a relevant fraction of what computation on L1 costs.
In short, it restores economic gravity to the blob market.

Under EIP-4844, blob pricing follows an EIP-1559-style auction:

• If demand exceeds the target number of blobs per block, the blob base fee rises.

• If demand is below target, it falls — with no lower limit.

Because demand for blobs is dominated by execution costs (not by the blob fee itself), this mechanism can easily “lose traction”: even large changes in blob base fee barely affect user behavior, so the algorithm keeps lowering the fee until it effectively hits 1 wei.

EIP-7918 modifies this logic. It introduces a reserve condition inside the function calc_excess_blob_gas():

if BLOB_BASE_COST * base_fee_per_gas > GAS_PER_BLOB * base_fee_per_blob_gas:
    # Do not subtract target_blob_gas

Translated into plain English:

When the execution gas cost of storing a blob (via BLOB_BASE_COST * base_fee_per_gas)
exceeds the current blob base fee, the protocol stops lowering the blob fee further.

This effectively sets a minimum price for blobspace equal to:

Thus, the blob base fee can never fall below one-sixteenth of the execution base fee, maintaining a proportional link between the two markets.

If the execution base fee is 10 gwei, then the minimum blob base fee becomes:

At 131,072 gas per blob, that’s ≈ 0.0000819 ETH per blob — a small but economically meaningful cost floor.

The motivation behind this EIP is twofold.

When blob consumers’ total cost is dominated by execution gas (for example, the cost of verifying a rollup’s proof), reducing the blob base fee has almost no effect on their demand.
The demand curve becomes vertical — perfectly inelastic — and the fee mechanism loses control.
This leads to a pathological state: the base fee drifts toward 1 wei, yet demand doesn’t respond, and when usage spikes again, it takes hours for the mechanism to readjust.

The reserve price restores elasticity to the market: once the base fee can no longer drop below the execution-cost floor, it once again influences user behavior and converges more smoothly toward equilibrium.

Every blob imposes computational work on the network:

• Nodes must verify KZG proofs to ensure data availability,

• PeerDAS (EIP-7594) increases verification workloads through per-cell sampling and batching,

• These operations consume CPU and memory even if the blob fee is negligible.

By tying the minimum blob fee to the execution base fee, EIP-7918 ensures that blob users pay at least a small fraction of the market rate for compute, aligning incentives and helping maintain node sustainability.

The proposal doesn’t alter the quantity of blobspace (the number of blobs per block), only the minimum unit price.
This means supply remains constant — around six target blobs per block, potentially increasing in future BPO updates — but the marginal price is prevented from collapsing.

Because blobs will no longer be effectively free, rollups will optimize batching and avoid wasting blobspace.
However, the impact on total demand is expected to be minimal: even at a 0.00008 ETH minimum, blobs remain far cheaper than using L1 gas directly.

In practice, the change discourages inefficient behavior without deterring legitimate usage.

The largest impact is on Ethereum’s burned fees.
Currently, blobs contribute less than 0.1 % of total ETH burned — essentially zero.
With EIP-7918, they would begin contributing meaningfully again, since every blob now guarantees a minimum burn linked to execution gas.

Even under moderate conditions, blobs could rise from 0.1 % to 1–3 % of Ethereum’s total burned ETH — an order-of-magnitude improvement over the post-Dencun baseline.

All rollup data was posted directly to L1, competing for execution gas.
Rollup transactions accounted for 10–20 % of total gas usage and therefore of burned ETH.
Ethereum captured strong value from L2 activity, though at the cost of high congestion.

Blobs decoupled data posting from execution gas, creating a new market with abundant supply and almost no demand pressure.
Blob fees collapsed, and the blob market contributed virtually nothing to ETH burn.
Ethereum became highly scalable, but economically “hollow”: blockspace was full, yet fee income fell sharply.

The new floor doesn’t restore pre-Dencun levels — and it shouldn’t.
Its purpose is to stabilize, not reverse, Ethereum’s rollup-centric design.

In relative terms:

Thus, EIP-7918 represents a partial restoration of value capture — not a regression, but a recalibration that ensures the blob market contributes to Ethereum’s fiscal health.

Ethereum’s strategy isn’t to make L1 expensive again; it’s to maintain sound incentives across layers.

• If blob fees were raised too high, rollups would lose competitiveness and migrate less data to Ethereum, undermining the scaling model.

• If blob fees remain at zero, L1 becomes a subsidized resource, hurting ETH’s long-term monetary sustainability.

EIP-7918 finds the middle ground:

• Cheap enough to sustain L2 growth,

• Expensive enough to signal scarcity and cover node costs,

• And adaptive, since the floor automatically scales with the execution base fee.

This design preserves economic discipline without sacrificing scalability — exactly the kind of monetary engineering Ethereum has been refining since EIP-1559.

Rollups will face a small but steady cost floor for blob posting.
The economic impact is marginal — fractions of a cent per transaction — but the predictability improves UX and fee estimation.
More importantly, it prevents “race-to-zero” dynamics that could lead to network-level inefficiencies or unfair competition.

By linking blob fees to execution gas, nodes are compensated more proportionally to the resources they expend verifying blobs and proofs, especially with the heavier workloads introduced by PeerDAS (EIP-7594).

A stable source of burn from blobs marginally strengthens ETH’s deflationary bias and enhances fee diversity — reducing dependence on execution-layer activity alone.

Blob floor active but mild. Burn increases modestly (≈ +0.3 %).
ETH impact: neutral to slightly bullish due to more stable fee income.

Blob floor meaningfully contributes 1–2 % of total burn.
ETH impact: moderately bullish, improved monetary capture.

Execution base fee high → blob floor rises proportionally → L2s pay more → strong burn.
ETH impact: bullish, as both execution and blob burns climb together.

Blob floor rarely active, burn unchanged.
ETH impact: neutral, but improved stability still a net positive.

Most likely outcome: Scenario 1 → 2 transition, yielding gradual recovery of blob-related burn without disrupting the L2 ecosystem.

The core issue after Dencun wasn’t technological but macroeconomic:
Ethereum scaled supply (blobs) far ahead of demand, collapsing its marginal pricing power.
EIP-7918 addresses that imbalance elegantly: it anchors blob pricing to the market value of computation, re-coupling blobspace to the network’s main economic variable — the execution base fee.

This transforms Ethereum’s dual-market design into a coherent two-gear system:

• Execution gas: drives core computation and L1 state transitions.

• Blob gas: scales data throughput, but remains tethered to execution value.

By binding these together, the protocol re-establishes a healthy feedback loop between resource consumption and economic contribution.

EIP-7918 doesn’t make blobs expensive. It makes them honest.
It ensures that scaling Ethereum doesn’t mean decoupling it from its monetary foundation.

The proposal:

• Prevents blob fees from collapsing to zero,

• Ensures blob users pay at least a fraction of real compute costs,

• Stabilizes the blob fee market and reintroduces elasticity,

• Adds 1–3 % of sustainable burn to Ethereum’s economy,

• And aligns long-term incentives between L1 and L2.

Dencun gave Ethereum unprecedented scalability but stripped its economic feedback.
EIP-7918 gives it back — not by limiting growth, but by re-anchoring prices to real costs.

The result is a more balanced, more predictable, and more sustainable Ethereum economy:
one that scales without forgetting that scalability must still pay its own way.