Scroll_ZKP fee spike
Scroll_ZKP briefly raised its Layer‑1 fee multipliers by about 1,280x over six days, which caused some users to overpay roughly $50,000 in fees. The sharp multiplier increase is a concrete example of how rollup fee parameter changes can quickly become a trader cost issue and create unexpected slippage for on‑chain activity. For desks and bots that route across L2s, this underlines the need to monitor rollup fee logic in real time. (x.com)
A user on Scroll said one transaction that had cost about $0.002 suddenly cost more than $20, and a later analysis said the network’s users overpaid more than $50,000 in roughly four days. The spike came from six manual changes to two fee multipliers, not from a jump in Ethereum gas itself. (thedefiant.io) Scroll is an Ethereum rollup, which means it batches lots of smaller transactions together and then posts the batch back to Ethereum for security. That is why every Scroll transaction has two pieces of cost: the Layer 2 execution fee and a separate Layer 1 data fee. (docs.scroll.io) That Layer 1 data fee is the charge for writing your transaction’s data back to Ethereum, like paying for truck space when your package gets loaded onto a long-distance shipment. Scroll’s own docs say the total fee is the Layer 2 fee plus the Layer 1 fee, both paid in Ether. (docs.scroll.io) The part that changed sits inside Scroll’s gas price oracle, which is the onchain calculator that tells wallets and apps what the Layer 1 portion should cost. According to The Defiant’s summary of L2BEAT’s analysis, Scroll manually raised two oracle multipliers by 2 times to 10 times per update until the combined effect reached about 1,280 times the original baseline by April 5, 2026. (thedefiant.io) L2BEAT’s reported estimate was that about 139,000 transactions were affected. At the old settings, those transactions would have cost about $280 in total for that Layer 1 component, but users instead paid upward of $50,000. (thedefiant.io) Most of that money did not come from human traders clicking buttons one by one. The largest share came from automated systems, with Ether.fi Cash bots alone accounting for roughly $35,000 of the excess while Ether.fi was migrating to Optimism, another Ethereum rollup. (thedefiant.io) That detail explains why the bill got so large so fast. Bots do not stop to ask whether a fee moved from fractions of a cent to double digits if their routing logic assumes the chain’s fee formula is stable. (thedefiant.io) Scroll had already changed its fee model in the Galileo upgrade in December 2025, when it introduced a new rollup fee structure with a linear base term and a quadratic penalty for unusually large transactions. Scroll said that change was meant to keep normal fees low while discouraging spam that forces unnecessary Ethereum blob costs. (scroll.io) So this was not a bug in the basic idea that rollups charge for Ethereum data. It was a reminder that fee formulas on rollups are adjustable knobs, and when those knobs move through a multisignature wallet or admin path, trading systems can start paying a very different price before anyone rewrites their bot. (thedefiant.io) (docs.scroll.io) Scroll cut both multipliers by 160 times on April 9, 2026, after the run-up had already happened. By April 11, 2026, L2BEAT still listed Scroll as a live zero-knowledge rollup with about $113.76 million in total value secured, which shows the network is still active even after a fee episode that small users might never have understood from their wallet screen alone. (thedefiant.io) (l2beat.com)
