Ethereum vs Modular L1s: Gas Costs

Single, global gas market: All execution, data, and state compete on one price curve (EIP-1559). This creates predictable, uniform costs for all applications, which is critical for DeFi protocols like Uniswap and Aave that require stable operational budgeting.

Gas fees fund the world's largest crypto-economic security budget (~$30B+ staked). You pay for the gold-standard of decentralization and censorship resistance. This is non-negotiable for high-value, trust-minimized applications like Lido or MakerDAO.

Specialized execution layers (e.g., Celestia + Rollups, EigenLayer AVS) decouple execution from consensus/data availability. This enables sub-cent transaction fees, making them viable for high-frequency micro-transactions in gaming (e.g., Paima Studios) or social apps.

Fragmented fee markets: Costs depend on separate execution, data availability (DA), and settlement layers. DA costs (e.g., on Celestia or EigenDA) can spike independently, creating unpredictable budgeting for dApps. Requires active management across multiple layers.

Specific advantage: Gas fees are determined by a single, transparent auction (EIP-1559) on the base layer. This provides cost predictability for protocols like Uniswap and Aave that require stable operating economics.

This matters for DeFi applications where user experience and profit margins depend on forecasting transaction costs, not competing with unrelated data blobs.

Specific advantage: Fees pay for the gold-standard security of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and its ~$110B+ staked economic security. Every transaction is validated by the same decentralized validator set that secures the entire state.

This matters for high-value settlements, institutional DeFi, and protocols where the cost of a security failure far outweighs gas expenses.

Specific advantage: By offloading execution to rollups, the base layer (DA) charges for data publishing only. Costs are driven by blob space, not computation, leading to fees often 100-1000x cheaper for raw data (e.g., ~$0.01 per 125 KB blob).

This matters for scaling social apps, gaming, and high-throughput dApps where cost-per-interaction must be negligible.

Specific disadvantage: End-user gas costs are set by individual rollups (e.g., Arbitrum, zkSync) and their sequencers. This creates a fragmented fee market where costs can spike on one rollup while others remain cheap, adding complexity for multi-chain dApps.

This matters for developers managing cross-rollup liquidity or users who need consistent costs across different applications.

High but stable base fee: Gas costs are determined by a robust, auction-based EIP-1559 mechanism, providing predictable fee estimation for users and dApps like Uniswap and Aave. This matters for enterprise applications requiring budget certainty and high-value transactions where security is paramount.

Expensive computation: Mainnet gas fees for complex operations (e.g., NFT minting, DeFi swaps) can exceed $50+ during congestion. This is prohibitive for high-frequency micro-transactions and mass-market consumer dApps, pushing volume to L2s like Arbitrum and Optimism.

Sub-cent data posting: Protocols like Celestia and Avail decouple data availability (DA), offering blob space for ~$0.003 per MB. This matters for high-throughput rollups (e.g., Eclipse, Fuel) and sovereign chains needing to minimize their largest operational cost.

Variable settlement & proving fees: While DA is cheap, users still pay for execution on connected rollups and proving on networks like EigenDA. Total cost depends on the modular stack's maturity and can be opaque compared to Ethereum's unified fee market. This matters for developers evaluating total cost of ownership.