Ethereum layer-2 networks need “responsive pricing” to scale to billions of users and reduce the fee swings that still accompany congestion, Offchain Labs co-founder Edward Felten said during a keynote at EthCC 2026.
Ethereum’s EIP-1559 upgrade, launched in August 2021 with the London hard fork, reformed the fee market by changing the gas fee limit and introducing a mechanism that burns part of transaction fees, removing them from circulation. Felten said gas-price swings remain the primary mechanism for protecting networks from overload during heavy demand, but that produces the fee volatility mainstream users reject.
“[With responsive pricing], you can see more traffic at lower gas prices without overrunning the infrastructure,” he said.
The challenge is no longer just adding throughput. It’s whether L2s can make transaction costs predictable enough for mainstream-style apps while still pricing congestion honestly to protect infrastructure. Arbitrum’s dynamic pricing rollout is one of the first live tests of that tradeoff.
Arbitrum One adopted dynamic pricing in January, describing the model as a direction “to make fees more predictable under demand by aligning prices with real network bottlenecks.” Felten showed charts indicating Arbitrum gas fees stayed lower during peak volumes than fees on Base and other L2s that still rely on EIP-1559.
Arbitrum One is the largest L2 with $15.2 billion in TVL, while Coinbase’s Base Chain is second with $10.9 billion, according to L2beat. L2s collectively secure over $39.7 billion in TVL, up 4.6% over the past year.
Critics note trade-offs. Julian Kors, senior developer and founder of Pulsar Spaces, said responsive pricing’s downside is lower predictability compared with EIP-1559. “The debate is not about one model being better, but whether networks optimise for predictability and mechanism design purity or for efficiency and real-time cost alignment. EIP-1559 does the first very well. Responsive pricing leans into the second,” he told Cointelegraph.
Others see responsive pricing as an improvement but not a final solution. Jerome de Tychey, president of Ethereum France and EthCC, said it could improve user experience by aligning fees more closely with demand. Cyprien Grau, project lead at gasless L2 Status Network, called it a “real improvement in fee accuracy,” but warned the model still depends on a fee market, so users can face variability and spikes.
“It doesn’t solve the structural problem: L2 gas fees trend toward zero as scaling on L1 and L2s improves and competition intensifies. Responsive pricing makes the decline smoother, but you’re still building a revenue model on a depreciating asset,” Grau said. He added that L2s that scale to billions of users will be those where users never think about gas and where network economics don’t depend on charging for it.
The fee-model debate comes as parts of the Ethereum ecosystem reassess the rollup-centric scaling thesis. In February, Vitalik Buterin argued some layer-2 assumptions no longer held and that future scaling should rely more on the mainnet and native rollups. L2s were created to offload transaction load from the mainnet, but they have also siphoned significant economic value from it, prompting a reconsideration of the L2-centric approach.
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