BLOB FEES, L2S, AND WHY BLOBS ARE JUST GETTING STARTED

Summary from the TLDR Crypto newsletter

If all Ethereum blobs were sold at the average per-byte rate paid by perp appchain Lighter over the past three days, L1 blob revenue would be about 5x higher (~$52 million per year), highlighting early but growing, relatively price-insensitive demand for data availability. Lighter currently pays 6x more per blob than Base (13x more per byte once normalized for fullness) while spending a smaller share of its L2 revenue on blobs thanks to highly optimized Data availability (DA) and zk state diffs, suggesting that efficient, high-margin L2s could drive blob fees up and force less efficient rollups toward higher costs or alternative DA, with blob revenue becoming “icing on the cake” for ETH.