Overall, we are supportive of all three proposed changes by OCL. Thank you to the team for the continued engineering work on the protocol.
In particular, we are in favor of granting Offchain Labs the flexibility to adjust the minimum L2 base fee within the 0.01 to 0.10 gwei range. This is an area we have written about extensively, most recently in our comment on the ArbOS51 proposal and the data since ArbOS 51’s activation on January 5th reinforces why this lever matters. Since being introduced on January 5th, the changes to congestion pricing and gas targets have caused L2 surplus fees to drop to <$1000 on all but extremely volatile days (Jan 31st for example).
In the 60 days prior to ArbOS 51, L2 surplus fees averaged roughly $23.9k per day and accounted for over 60% of transaction fee income, while L2 base fees contributed just $13.8k per day (36.2% of the total). Since ArbOS 51, that composition has inverted and the L2 base fee has effectively become the DAO’s primary stable income source, averaging now roughly $19.7k per day.
Additionally, the core rationale remains the same in that a majority of activity on Arbitrum One is bot activity and that organic users are less price sensitive to slight increases to the minimum base fee. Since it was raised to 0.02 gwei in early January, we have not seen a noticeable change in the percentage of user transactions vs active/likely bot transactions. Roughly 80-90% of daily transactions on Arbitrum One are still bot-driven despite the increase to their costs.
With Dynamic Pricing potentially improving throughput during times of congestion even further, we believe giving OCL the operational flexibility to iterate on this parameter is the best approach for balancing revenue and the user experience on Arbitrum.
Lastly, Entropy is also very supportive of increasing Stylus contract sizes to 96kb. Contract size limits were consistently the primary pain point raised by builders in the Stylus Sprint as the overhead in splitting and managing multiple contracts degraded developer experience and impacted performance benchmarks.