A month after the Pectra upgrade, key indicators for Ethereum began to uncover the promises and pitfalls of the network’s most ambitious technology overhaul since the 2022 “Merge.”
One of the key features brought about by the Pectra upgrade was to expand its ability to handle “Blobs,” a unit of “Blobs,” a unit of “Flatten Data Storage,” as defined by the protocol developer team.
A BLOB is a dedicated data structure that can store large amounts of data. A lot of blobs means transactions, layer 2 networking, and rollup operations could be even cheaper.
“The cost of a near-zero blob was a major unlock for Ethereum’s scalability,” said Ulyana Skladchikova, head of product for open source multi-chain explorer block skate. Decryption.
The same aspect made it more cost-effective to allow Layer-2 to post data and thrive high-throughput, low-cost rollups,” she explained.
These high-throughput and low-cost rollups include common networks such as Coinbase incubated base, arbitrum, optimism, and more, which allow you to process thousands of transactions of penny rather than dollars.
For Ethereum, this means that it “provides modular vision,” which “can provide real benefits already visible to the entire L2 ecosystem,” Skladchikova said.
The blobs are cheaper
A week after the Pectra upgrade, rollups like Base and Arbitrum were paying less than a penny for transactions every day.
“For the first time since mid-April 2025, Blobs is virtually free again,” wrote Zack Pokorny, research analyst at Digital Asset Firm Galaxy, in a report on May 15.
Since Pectra was released, it has tallied only “1 in 4,000th of a penny.” Pokorny compared it to about $16,000 a day before the Pectra upgrade, according to data from Blobs’ Dune Dashboard.
The component responsible for this was the EIP-7691, which introduced BLOB scaling in Pectra. In the days after Pectra activation, BLOB usage increased by about 20%, increasing daily BLOB purchases to 25,600.
Still, despite the increase, the rollup is still not taking full advantage of the expanded capacity. As a result, Pokorny explained that Blob prices have dropped significantly.
By the end of May, BLOB usage had risen to around 28,000, representing a 33% increase since Pectra was published.
Validator Integration
Reducing blob costs improved the profit margins of rollups, but also presented validator challenges.
BlockScout’s Skladchikova has indirectly increased the “validator data burden” due to improved Blobs costs. Decryption. Still, this could be viewed as a trade-off, she argued.
A validator is a person or organization that helps you run Ethereum by keeping Ethereum safe and processing transactions. They do this by locking a portion of their ETH as a deposit. This is called “staking.” In return, they can earn ETH rewards. However, if the hardware they use to help validate transactions goes offline too often or breaks rules, they could lose some of the ETH they bet.
Some small validators are fused with larger operations that can handle both higher stake limits and increased storage burdens, as they may not be able to provide new costs to process more data without risking penalties.
“The integration of validators often raises concerns about centralization,” Skladchikova said.
Ethereum prices saw wild rise in May, with prices surged from around $1,800 to a peak of nearly $2,800 at the beginning of the month. At the time of writing, ETH has remained up 27% over the past 30 days.
Edited by Stacy Elliott.