Author: Alex O’Donnell, CoinTelegraph; Compiled by Tao Zhu, Golden Finance

According to Etherscan, the main source of revenue for the Ethereum network from the Layer 2 (L2) expansion chain—“blob fees”—has fallen to its lowest weekly level so far this year.

Ethereum earned only 3.18 Ethers from blob fees in the week ended March 30, about $6,000 as of April 1, according to Etherscan.

Etherscan said in X's post that the figure is down 73% from the previous week and more than 95% from the week ended March 16, when Ethereum earned more than 84 ETH from blob fees.

In March 2024, Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade migrated L2 transaction data to temporary off-chain storage called “blobs”.

The upgrade lowered user costs but also reduced Ethereum’s overall expense revenue – initially down 95%.

“The weak ETH expenses are due to lack of Blob revenue as L2 has not filled available capacity yet,” said Matthew Sigel, VanEck’s head of digital assets research in a November 1, 2024 article on the X platform.

The growth of blob fees has been unstable since then. According to Dune Analytics, Ethereum's weekly blob fee revenue peaked at nearly $1 million in November, and then dropped sharply in recent weeks.

Ethereum's blob fee income has been unstable. Source: Dune Analytics

Ethereum has been struggling to earn meaningful income from blob fees, highlighting concerns about the network scaling model, which relies heavily on L2 for transaction throughput.

“The future of Ethereum will revolve around how it effectively acts as the data availability engine for L2,” arndxt, author of the Threading on the Edge newsletter, said in a March 31 X post.

According to DeFi Report founder Michael Nadeau in X's post, L2 transaction volume needs to increase by 22,0Only more than 00 times can the blob fee completely offset Ethereum's peak transaction fee income.

However, Ethereum's economy is still growing. For example, the network's Pectra upgrade is scheduled this year, aiming to significantly change the way Ethereum allocates blob space.

"The plan is simple: expand Ethereum as much as possible to capture as much market share as possible, and then consider expense revenue later," Sassar, founder of The Daily Gwei, said in a post on March 17 X.