# EIP-7918: Restoring Economic Balance to Ethereum’s Blob Market

By [Jesus Crypto Plaza 🌳](https://paragraph.com/@cryptoplaza) · 2025-11-07

eip, ethereum, gas, fusaka

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Introduction — A Market That Lost Its Price Signal
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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.

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1\. The Technical Core: A Dynamic Reserve Price
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### How the Proposal Works

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:

![](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/200e1b9e445e242c363826cfa8964a757a2f14b9bf97e83015d43fc24c4cfeb4.png)

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

### Example

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

![](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/4eda556a7c547b826e8c3d2df386ab222afd150cc9efa172a14b899158d4bc57.png)

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

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2\. Motivation: Fixing a Broken Auction and Paying for Compute
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The motivation behind this EIP is twofold.

### 2.1 Fixing Fee Inelasticity

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.

### 2.2 Internalizing Compute Costs

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.

* * *

3\. The Economic Mechanics — Supply, Demand, and Burn
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### Supply: Unchanged, But Now With a Real Price Floor

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.

### Demand: Slightly Lower, But More Efficient

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.

### Burn and ETH Value Capture

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.

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4\. Quantitative Scenarios
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![](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/6bca8020a13531b41d3dcfdd6d6b71de8114937dd1d71a62f9b25e03c270d7f9.png)

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.

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5\. Comparison to the Dencun Shock
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### 5.1 Before Dencun (Pre-4844)

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.

### 5.2 After Dencun

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.

### 5.3 With EIP-7918

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:

![](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/baecdba2103883ce9a190ab382b437ee2161771ee68cfe664217b0005d7e577c.png)

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.

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6\. Why a Partial Recovery Is the Right Choice
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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.

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7\. Broader Market Implications
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### 7.1 For Layer-2 Rollups

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.

### 7.2 For Validators and Node Operators

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)**.

### 7.3 For ETH Holders

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

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8\. Economic Scenarios for ETH
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### Scenario 1 — Execution-Led Regime (Low Congestion)

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

### Scenario 2 — Balanced Regime (Medium Congestion)

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

### Scenario 3 — Congested Regime (High Fees)

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

### Scenario 4 — Demand Saturation (Stagnant Blob Usage)

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.

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9\. Macroeconomic Reflection — Fixing Dencun’s Asymmetry
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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**.

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10\. Conclusion — Re-Introducing Discipline to Scalability
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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.
    

### In Perspective

> **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**.

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*Originally published on [Jesus Crypto Plaza 🌳](https://paragraph.com/@cryptoplaza/eip-7918-restoring-economic-balance-to-ethereums-blob-market)*
