Rollup Fee Market

A rollup's fees cover two costs: running its own execution and posting data to Ethereum or another data layer. The sequencer sets the price and keeps any margin. When Ethereum data costs fall, as they did after blobs arrived, rollup fees drop; when L2 demand spikes, local congestion can raise them. Some rollups add priority fees for faster inclusion.

A worked breakdown

OP Mainnet's docs split each fee into two parts. The execution part works like Ethereum's: gas used times a base fee that moves with demand, plus a priority fee you choose. The second part, the L1 data fee, covers posting your transaction to Ethereum. It's based on the compressed size of your transaction and on Ethereum's current base fee and blob fee. A later upgrade called Isthmus added room for an operator fee on top, which OP Mainnet sets to zero.

What blobs changed

Ethereum's Dencun upgrade on March 13, 2024 brought EIP-4844 blobs, a cheaper kind of data space for rollups that Ethereum keeps for about 18 days and then prunes. Blobs have their own fee market, apart from normal gas. When blob demand is low, the data part of a rollup fee can be tiny, and execution becomes most of the cost.

More blob space since then

Ethereum has kept adding room. Pectra in May 2025 doubled the blob target from three per block to six. Fusaka in December 2025 added PeerDAS, which lets nodes check blob data by sampling pieces of it, and two follow-up forks raised the target to 14 by January 2026. If many rollups want blobs at once, the blob fee still climbs and every rollup's data cost goes up with it.

Keeping rollup fees down

The fee estimate in your wallet usually includes both parts. Big, data heavy transactions cost more on rollups than simple transfers do, so batching actions or waiting for a quiet hour can help. Fees vary a lot between rollups, so compare before moving funds just to save a few cents.