Ethereum L2s urged to adopt responsive pricing model

Offchain Labs said Ethereum layer-2 networks need responsive pricing to manage rising demand and reduce swings in gas fees. At EthCC 2026, Edward Felten argued that gas price volatility remains the main defense against network congestion, but said L2s should align pricing with real infrastructure bottlenecks while keeping systems stable.

Responsive pricing as a way to manage congestion

Felten said gas spikes continue to act as the primary mechanism during heavy traffic because they raise costs quickly. He argued, however, that responsive pricing can increase transaction throughput at lower fees without overwhelming infrastructure.

“[With responsive pricing], you can see more traffic at lower gas prices without overrunning the infrastructure,” Felten said.

He noted that Ethereum’s EIP-1559 upgrade, implemented in August 2021, reshaped the fee market by changing the gas limit mechanism and burning part of each transaction fee. Despite that, he said gas volatility persists and users still reject unpredictable costs.

Arbitrum and Base compare fee behavior during peak demand

Felten presented charts comparing Arbitrum and Base during peak demand periods. The data, he said, showed Arbitrum’s gas fees stayed lower at high volumes than networks relying on EIP-1559 alone.

Felten said Arbitrum One introduced dynamic pricing in January to align fees with system bottlenecks. Arbitrum described the change as a move toward predictable fees under demand, aiming to match prices with actual infrastructure constraints. Felten said the rollout was among the first live tests of this pricing model.

Market data and adoption signals

Arbitrum One leads the layer-2 market with $15.2 billion in total value locked, while Base holds $10.9 billion in TVL, according to L2beat data. The same data set indicates total value locked across L2 networks is over $39.7 billion, representing a 4.6% yearly increase.

Debate among industry figures

Julian Kors, founder of Pulsar Spaces, said responsive pricing reduces predictability compared with EIP-1559. He said networks must balance “mechanism design purity” against real-time efficiency, adding: “EIP-1559 does the first very well. Responsive pricing leans into the second.”

Jerome de Tychey, president of Ethereum France, said responsive pricing could improve user experience by making fees reflect demand more closely, though he did not claim it eliminates volatility.

Cyprien Grau, project lead at Status Network, called the model a “real improvement in fee accuracy,” but said it still depends on a fee market that can produce spikes. “It doesn’t solve the structural problem,” he said.

Grau also said L2 gas fees trend toward zero as scaling improves and competition grows. He argued that responsive pricing smooths the decline but does not replace the gas model, adding that future L2s must remove gas from the user experience entirely.

Broader scaling discussion continues

The debate comes as Ethereum revisits its rollup-focused scaling thesis. In February, Vitalik Buterin said some layer-2 assumptions no longer hold and argued that future scaling should rely more on the mainnet and native rollups.