Customers of Scroll, an Ethereum Layer 2 (L2) community, paid greater than $50,000 in extra transaction charges in about 4 days after the venture’s crew repeatedly elevated the parameters that decide how a lot customers pay to put up knowledge to Ethereum, in line with an evaluation printed by L2BEAT.
This overcharge resulted from six guide will increase leading to two price multipliers in Scroll’s gasoline worth oracle, a wise contract that calculates the layer 1 knowledge portion of all transaction prices. In keeping with L2BEAT, every replace elevated the earlier worth by an element of two to 10, and by April 5, it had ballooned to 1,280 occasions the unique baseline. On April ninth, the crew lowered each multipliers to 160x.
The baseline price for all roughly 139,000 affected transactions was simply $280. In trade, customers paid greater than $50,000 in whole, with automated bots accounting for the majority of that.
Scroll has not publicly commented on the findings of this examine as of this writing.
The Etherfi Money bot was nonetheless operating throughout the protocol’s transition to Optimism and accounted for roughly $35,000 per L2BEAT, or 66% of the overage. Scroll’s personal oracle intermediaries paid about $5,200, with LayerZero, Succinct, and different bots accounting for the remaining.
The problem was first reported by an nameless developer operating the Succinct relayer, who posted on X that transaction prices had jumped from $0.002 to greater than $20.
“Scroll used to subsidize the price of L1 DA, however has it now fastened its pricing to be sustainable?” the developer requested. “So Scroll has no different customers however us, and we’re paying full worth?”
Cryptocurrency analysis agency Kairos Analysis famous that the rise in charges seems to have coincided with etherfi’s transition to Optimism. When etherfi was Scroll’s main app, whole every day transaction charges from that product averaged about $250. After multiplier will increase started on March thirty first, that quantity jumped to about $16,000 per day.
L2BEAT clarified that the overcharging just isn’t a problem with the sequencer because the L1 gasoline costs reported by Oracle are correct. All overcharges have been as a consequence of multiplier will increase and went by means of a separate governance path involving the crew’s multisig pockets.
This episode raises the query of whether or not Scroll was charging under price to retain customers. It is a frequent observe amongst L2s competing for exercise, who all of the sudden revise their costs after the biggest price supplier withdraws.
In keeping with DeFiLlama, Scroll’s whole lock (TVL) stays at simply $24 million, down 96% from its peak of $585 million in October 2024.
This text was written with the assistance of AI Workflow. All of our tales are hand-picked, edited and fact-checked by people.
