Ethereum Earns Fees Despite Shift to Rollups

The Ethereum network has long been criticized for its high gas fees and slow transaction times. However, rollups like Arbitrum, Base, and Optimism have emerged as a solution to these problems by executing most user transactions away from Ethereum's Layer 1. But despite the shift in processing power, Ethereum still earns fees from these rollups.

Rollup operators collect fees from users for executing transactions on Layer 2 and use part of that revenue to cover their Ethereum expenses. These fees include the cost of publishing transaction data to Ethereum, which can be a significant expense. In fact, according to Ethereum.org, more than 90% of rollup transaction costs historically came from storing data on Ethereum.

Blobs, introduced by EIP-4844, have made it cheaper for rollups to publish transaction data to Ethereum. However, this has also led to a trade-off: Ethereum may earn less per unit of rollup activity as the cost of publishing data decreases. To compensate, Ethereum's roadmap targets further improvements that could support more than 100,000 transactions per second across Layer 2 networks.

Zero-knowledge rollups add another expense for Ethereum, as they generate cryptographic proofs showing that off-chain transaction batches were processed correctly and then submit those proofs for verification on Ethereum. This process consumes roughly 500,000 gas, although actual requirements depend on the rollup and proof system.