Layer 2 Fee Comparison Calculator

A rollup fee has two parts: the cost of executing a transaction on the layer 2, which is cheap because the sequencer runs without mainnet competition, and the cost of publishing data back to Ethereum, which is usually the larger share. This calculator models both as multiples of the equivalent mainnet cost, computed from gas units times gas price in gwei times the ether price. Typical gas usage is 21,000 units for an ether transfer, about 65,000 for an ERC-20 transfer, and roughly 150,000 to 180,000 for an NFT mint or a decentralized exchange swap. Optimistic rollups such as Arbitrum, Optimism and Base publish full compressed transaction data; zero-knowledge rollups publish validity proofs and less data but pay more to generate them. Polygon PoS is included for comparison but is a sidechain rather than a rollup: it runs its own validator set and posts no data to Ethereum, which is why its cost is near zero and why its security assumption differs fundamentally. The multipliers used here are averages and will drift, because blob space carries its own fee market that spikes when many rollups compete for it. Several costs sit outside the model entirely: bridging in and out, the seven-day challenge window on optimistic rollups when withdrawing to layer 1, and the fee charged by fast bridge services, typically 0.05 to 0.5 percent, that let users skip that wait.

Ethereum scaling proposals moved through several generations. Payment channels came first, with the Lightning Network paper by Joseph Poon and Thaddeus Dryja for Bitcoin in 2015 and the Raiden project for Ethereum. Poon and Vitalik Buterin published Plasma in August 2017, proposing child chains that commit periodically to the main chain, but exit games and data availability proved awkward in practice. The rollup idea, in which transaction data is posted to the main chain while execution happens off it, was demonstrated by the pseudonymous researcher Barry Whitehat in 2018, and John Adler described the optimistic variant secured by fraud proofs in 2019. Production networks arrived from 2021. Arbitrum One and Optimism opened to users that year, Polygon PoS had been running as a proof-of-stake sidechain since 2020, zkSync Era launched its zero-knowledge rollup in 2023, and Coinbase launched Base on the OP Stack in August 2023. The decisive cost change came with EIP-4844, activated in the Dencun upgrade on 13 March 2024, which introduced blob transactions carrying rollup data in a separate and much cheaper market. Layer 2 fees fell by an order of magnitude or more almost immediately, turning a typical rollup transfer from tens of cents into a fraction of a cent.