Ethereum vs Celestia Rollups: Total Cost

Execution & Data on one chain: You pay for everything—computation, storage, and consensus—in one fee (gas). This provides the highest security but at a premium.

• Cost Example: A simple ERC-20 transfer can cost $5-15 during peak demand.
• This matters for protocols where absolute security and maximal composability are non-negotiable, like a foundational DeFi money market (e.g., Aave, Compound).

Congestion-driven pricing: Your operational costs are directly exposed to mainnet activity and ETH price volatility. A popular NFT mint can spike gas for all dApps.

• Metric: Base fee can swing from <10 Gwei to >200 Gwei in hours.
• This matters for applications requiring stable, predictable operating expenses, like a subscription service or enterprise settlement layer. Unpredictable costs can break business models.

Modular Data Availability: You only pay Celestia for data posting (~$0.01 per MB). Execution is handled off-chain by your rollup's sequencer, decoupling compute costs from a congested L1.

• Cost Example: 100k simple transfers can cost less than $1 in data fees.
• This matters for high-throughput, cost-sensitive applications like gaming, social feeds, or microtransactions where L1 fees are prohibitive.

Operational Complexity Cost: While data is cheap, you must run/trust a sequencer and fund bridges for liquidity. This adds fixed engineering and capital costs.

• Examples: You need infrastructure for sequencer nodes, fraud/zk proofs, and liquidity pools for canonical bridges.
• This matters for teams with smaller devops capacity or limited upfront capital. The cost savings shift from pure fees to operational overhead.

Guaranteed Security: Data is secured by Ethereum's $500B+ consensus. This is the industry's gold standard for trust minimization. High, Volatile Fees: Blob fees are subject to base fee auctions. During network congestion, costs can spike unpredictably, as seen with early Dencun upgrade activity. Best For: High-value DeFi protocols (like Aave, Uniswap) and applications where the cost of a security failure vastly exceeds data availability expenses.

Native Liquidity & Composability: Rollups settle directly on Ethereum L1, enabling seamless trust-minimized bridging and atomic composability with the entire ecosystem (e.g., shared DEX liquidity). Settlement Cost Included: The L1 gas cost for publishing proofs and state roots is bundled, providing a unified security and finality layer. Trade-off: You pay a premium for this deep integration, which may be unnecessary for applications with isolated liquidity needs.

Modular Data Fee: Pay only for blob space on a dedicated data availability layer. Fees are designed to be low and stable, decoupled from execution demand. Cost Scaling: As a rollup, your costs scale with your usage, not the entire network's activity. Projects like Dymension and Saga report ~100x cost reductions vs. Ethereum L1 posting. Best For: High-throughput applications (gaming, social), new chains bootstrapping, and cost-sensitive use cases where extreme Ethereum-level security is secondary.

Separate Settlement Cost: You must choose and pay for a separate settlement layer (e.g., Ethereum, Arbitrum Orbit, Celestia's own settlement). This adds operational overhead and fragments liquidity. Flexibility as a Feature: You can opt for a cheaper, faster settlement option (like Celestia's) or a more secure one, tailoring your stack. This is ideal for appchains with specific VM needs (EVM, SVM, Move). Trade-off: Lower baseline costs come with the responsibility of managing a multi-layer architecture and potentially weaker shared security assumptions.