Ethereum layer-2 networks need “responsive pricing” to scale to billions of users and to tame the fee swings that still accompany congestion, Offchain Labs co‑founder Edward Felten said in a keynote at EthCC 2026.
EIP‑1559, introduced with Ethereum’s London hard fork in August 2021, reshaped the fee market by adjusting gas limits and burning a portion of transaction fees. Felten noted that gas‑price spikes remain the main on‑chain mechanism to prevent overload during surges in demand, but that volatility is unacceptable to mainstream users.
“[With responsive pricing], you can see more traffic at lower gas prices without overrunning the infrastructure,” he said.
The issue for L2s is no longer just adding throughput. It’s making transaction costs predictable enough for consumer‑grade applications while still pricing congestion honestly to protect validators and sequencers. Arbitrum’s dynamic pricing rollout is one of the earliest live experiments in that trade‑off.
Arbitrum One implemented dynamic pricing in January, describing the approach as a move “to make fees more predictable under demand by aligning prices with real network bottlenecks.” Felten presented charts suggesting Arbitrum’s gas fees remained lower during peak volumes than fees on Base and other L2s that still rely primarily on EIP‑1559 mechanisms.
By network size, Arbitrum One is the largest L2 with $15.2 billion in TVL, while Coinbase’s Base is second with $10.9 billion, according to L2beat. L2s overall secure more than $39.7 billion in TVL, a 4.6% increase over the past year.
Critics point to trade‑offs. Julian Kors, senior developer and founder of Pulsar Spaces, warned responsive pricing can reduce predictability versus 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,” he said. “EIP‑1559 does the first very well. Responsive pricing leans into the second.”
Other voices call responsive pricing an improvement but not a final fix. Jerome de Tychey, president of Ethereum France and EthCC, said it can improve UX by tying fees more closely to demand. Cyprien Grau, project lead at gasless L2 Status Network, described it as a “real improvement in fee accuracy,” while cautioning that because the model still relies on a market for fees, 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,” Grau added. “Responsive pricing makes the decline smoother, but you’re still building a revenue model on a depreciating asset.” He said L2s that succeed at billion‑user scale will be those where users never think about gas and where network economics don’t depend on charging for it.
The fee‑model debate arrives as parts of the Ethereum ecosystem reassess the rollup‑centric scaling thesis. In February, Vitalik Buterin argued some layer‑2 assumptions have weakened and suggested future scaling should lean more on the mainnet and native rollups. L2s were designed to offload transactions from Ethereum but have also diverted economic activity, prompting renewed discussion about whether the current L2‑centric path is optimal.
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