Late 2023 witnessed significant user activity on EVM chains, resulting in a surge in transaction activity and putting many rollups into the first live test. While some rollups performed well, some others experienced downtime during this period, affecting transaction finality time and gas fees. To address the lack of empirical research on rollups, we perform the first study during a heightened activity during the late 2023 transaction boom, as attributed to inscriptions - a novel technique that enables NFT and ERC-20 token creation on Bitcoin and other blockchains. We observe that minting inscription-based meme tokens on zkSync Era allows for trading at a fraction of the costs, compared to the Bitcoin or Ethereum networks. We also found that the increased transaction activity, over 99% attributed to the minting of new inscription tokens, positively affected other users of zkSync Era, resulting in lowered gas fees. Unlike L1 blockchains, ZK rollups may experience lower gas fees with increased transaction volume. Lastly, the introduction of blobs - a form of temporary data storage - decreased the gas costs of Ethereum rollups, but also raised a number of questions about the security of inscription-based tokens.

中文翻译：

---

不祥之兆：分析铭文的繁荣及其对 Rollup 性能和成本效率的影响

2023 年底，EVM 链上出现了大量用户活动，导致交易活动激增，并将许多汇总纳入首次实时测试。虽然一些汇总表现良好，但其他一些在此期间经历了停机，影响了交易最终确定时间和天然气费用。为了解决缺乏有关汇总的实证研究的问题，我们在 2023 年末交易繁荣期间的活动加剧期间进行了第一项研究，归因于铭文 - 一种能够在比特币和其他区块链上创建 NFT 和 ERC-20 代币的新技术。我们观察到，与比特币或以太坊网络相比，在 zkSync Era 上铸造基于铭文的 meme 代币可以以较低的成本进行交易。我们还发现，交易活动的增加（超过 99% 归因于新铭文代币的铸造）对 zkSync Era 的其他用户产生了积极影响，从而降低了 Gas 费用。与 L1 区块链不同，ZK Rollups 可能会随着交易量的增加而经历较低的 Gas 费。最后，blob（一种临时数据存储形式）的引入降低了以太坊汇总的 Gas 成本，但也引发了一些有关基于铭文的代币安全性的问题。