In a display of true degen style, it took less than thirteen minutes after the launch of Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade for someone to upload the complete script of the Bee Movie on the mainnet, costing only about $14.
Dan Cline, an Ethereum developer, claims to have been the first to upload the full-length script on the blockchain, taking advantage of the new upgrade that aims to significantly reduce fees on Ethereum layer 2s.
“I might not have been the first to upload a blob, but as far as I know, I was the first to upload the Bee Movie on the mainnet,” Cline wrote in a post on X.
Uploading the Bee Movie script has become a long-standing joke both within and outside of the crypto community. It usually involves a race to upload the full script on newly launched networks and blockchain-related platforms. This trend originated from a larger Bee Movie meme, where people share the entire script on social media whenever possible.
According to Blobscan data, the script was uploaded at 2:08 pm UTC on March 13, just 13 minutes after the Dencun upgrade went live. The transaction cost a total of $13.88, as reported by Etherscan.
Also known as EIP-4844 or “proto-danksharding,” blobs were introduced as a core feature of Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade to significantly reduce transaction costs on layer-2 networks. Alongside various other improvements, the Dencun upgrade allows layer 2s to use blobs instead of calldata functions to temporarily store data during transactions, resulting in lower costs for users.
Cline’s Bee Movie script will only exist on the Ethereum network for a few more weeks, as blobs are “pruned” after approximately 18 days, which is the time required for a layer 2 to retrieve the data contained within them.
Mason Hall, an engineer and investment partner at crypto venture capital firm a16z, reported doing the same thing less than an hour later, stating that it cost him $5 to execute.
As of now, three Ethereum layer-2 networks – Starknet, ZkSync, Optimism, and Base – have implemented blobs on their networks, according to Dune Analytics data.
In a post on X, Jesse Pollak, the lead developer of Base, announced on March 14 that the integration of blobs on the Base network had led to a significant reduction in transaction fees, from around $0.31 to near-zero.
Since the Dencun upgrade was rolled out on the Ethereum mainnet on March 13, over 2,000 blobs have been posted on Ethereum’s Beacon Chain, with Starknet accounting for 74% of all submitted blobs.
Apart from EIP-4844, the Dencun upgrade includes eight other EIPs aimed at improving various functions on the network, including consensus, execution, and data costs. One of these is EIP-1153, which introduces a “transient storage” system to further reduce fees, and EIP-4788, which increases transparency by storing the root of each Beacon Chain block in a smart contract that can be queried by applications. Developers expect the data provided by EIP-4788 to be used in new features for bridges and staking pools.
The reduction in fees on swaps and transactions on Ethereum layer 2s will only take effect once the networks start integrating EIP-4844.
Currently, swap fees on the largest layer-2 network, Arbitrum, are still around $1.16, while swap fees on Polygon stand at $1.46, according to L2 Fees data.
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