A brief explanation of the surge in Arbitrum Gas fee on June 29, 2022

On June 29, 2022, Arbitrum’s L2 computational gas skyrocketed (like L1 also has a gas war), which was directly caused by Odyssey’s activities. It was not, as some rumors indicated, that there was a problem with the gas estimation of L1’s batch submission.

The essence of this problem is that the gas bidding model of L2 cannot be simply canceled, because the cost of attacking the sequencer will be very low, so there are only two solutions:
1. Optimize the billing model
2. Reduce the actual cost of computational, such as nitro

Some users do not understand why the gas fee of L2 can be higher than that of L1. Because L2 also uses the bidding model in essence. The cost of L2 can be divided into two parts, one part is the L1 data submission fee, and the other part is the running cost of the L2 sequencer itself. Theoretically the more people there are, the cheaper the equal cost of everyone for the first part will be. But for the second part is that the more people, the more expensive it is.

The practical significance of the Arbitrum gas fee surge is to show us that, the cost of L2 can be even higher than that of L1 cause this Odyssey event Arbitrum is so popular. Although we know in the past that the L2 operating cost may be high in theory, it has never been seen in practice before. In fact, all L2 networks have this problem as long as they charge for operations. So for all L2 projects, this place be optimized.

There are also some other rumors, like this Tweet. Go+ will clarify this together. No matter what the set MinExecution Fee means, it is only a parameter in the dApp’s contract and cannot modify the gas usage of the entire Arbitrum network.

Write by Go+ researcher Ben