Arbitrum developers will reduce the cost of layer-2 transactions by 10 times, with gas fee reductions going live on March 18.

The Offchain Labs team has implemented an update to ArbOS, also known as Atlas. The upgrade will add support for binary large objects (blob) transactions, designed to reduce the cost of transferring data from Layer 2 to the Ethereum mainnet.

The Arbitrum community supported Atlas, which involved most of the changes implemented as part of the upgrade the day before. Representatives of Offchain Labs expect a tenfold reduction in the average value of the base commission—from 0.1 Gwei to 0.01 Gwei. An operation that previously cost $0.5 will now cost the user approximately $0.05.

The other layer-2 networks, Optimism, and Base, have significantly improved their gas efficiency after the Dencun update went live. Gas fees in the Base protocol immediately dropped from $0.31 to $0.0005.

In Optimism, transaction costs have been reduced to less than $0.01, according to L2Fees.

The commissions on the Arbitrum network were updated on March 13, following the activation of Dencun on the Ethereum mainnet. A vital upgrade component, the EIP-4844, is designed to scale the network by creating a new transaction type for a blob. The update will reduce the cost of layer-2 operations tenfold and significantly increase Ethereum throughput.