Scroll Users Paid $50K in Excess Fees After Team Cranked L1 Fees by 1,280x
Customers on Scroll, an Ethereum Layer 2 (L2) community, paid greater than $50,000 in extra transaction charges over roughly 4 days after the staff behind the undertaking repeatedly raised the parameters that decide how a lot customers pay for posting information to Ethereum, in keeping with an evaluation printed by L2BEAT.
The overcharges stemmed from six guide will increase to 2 payment multipliers on Scroll’s gasoline worth oracle, the sensible contract that calculates the Layer 1 information portion of each transaction’s price. Every replace raised the earlier worth by 2x to 10x, compounding to 1,280x the unique baseline by April 5, L2BEAT mentioned. On April 9, the staff slashed each multipliers by 160x.
The baseline price for all roughly 139,000 affected transactions would have been simply $280. As a substitute, customers collectively paid upward of $50,000, with automated bots accounting for the overwhelming majority.
Scroll has not publicly addressed the findings on the time of writing.
Etherfi Money bots, that are nonetheless operating throughout the protocol’s ongoing migration to Optimism, accounted for roughly $35,000, or 66% of the surplus, per L2BEAT. Scroll’s personal oracle relayer paid roughly $5,200, with LayerZero, Succinct, and different bots making up the remaining.
The problem was first flagged by a pseudonymous developer operating a Succinct relayer, who posted on X that their transaction prices had jumped from $0.002 to over $20.
“Scroll was subsidizing L1 DA prices and is now correcting to sustainable pricing?” the developer requested. “And there is no customers on Scroll besides us, so we’re paying full worth for it?”
Crypto analysis agency Kairos Analysis famous that the payment spike appeared to coincide with etherfi’s migration to Optimism. When etherfi was Scroll’s dominant app, whole each day transaction charges from its merchandise averaged about $250. After the multiplier will increase started on March 31, that determine jumped to roughly $16,000 per day.
L2BEAT clarified that the overcharges weren’t a sequencer challenge, because the L1 gasoline costs reported by the oracle had been correct. The complete overcharge got here from the multiplier will increase, which went by means of a separate governance path involving the staff’s multisig pockets.
The episode raises the query of whether or not Scroll had been operating charges beneath price to retain customers, a standard follow amongst L2s competing for exercise, and abruptly repriced as soon as its largest payment contributor departed.
Scroll’s whole worth locked (TVL) sits at simply $24 million, in keeping with DeFiLlama, down 96% from its peak of $585 millon in October 2024.
This text was written with the help of AI workflows. All our tales are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.
