Users of Scroll, an Ethereum Layer 2 (L2) network, paid more than $50,000 in excess transaction fees in about four days after the project’s team repeatedly increased the parameters that determine how much users pay to post data to Ethereum, according to an analysis published by L2BEAT.
This overcharge resulted from six manual increases resulting in two fee multipliers in Scroll’s gas price oracle, a smart contract that calculates the layer 1 data portion of all transaction costs. According to L2BEAT, each update increased the previous value by a factor of 2 to 10, and by April 5, it had ballooned to 1,280 times the original baseline. On April 9th, the team lowered both multipliers to 160x.
The baseline cost for all approximately 139,000 affected transactions was just $280. In exchange, users paid more than $50,000 in total, with automated bots accounting for the bulk of that.
Scroll has not publicly commented on the findings of this study as of this writing.
The Etherfi Cash bot was still running during the protocol’s transition to Optimism and accounted for approximately $35,000 per L2BEAT, or 66% of the overage. Scroll’s own oracle intermediaries paid about $5,200, with LayerZero, Succinct, and other bots accounting for the rest.
The issue was first reported by an anonymous developer running the Succinct relayer, who posted on X that transaction costs had jumped from $0.002 to more than $20.
“Scroll used to subsidize the cost of L1 DA, but has it now fixed its pricing to be sustainable?” the developer asked. “So Scroll has no other users but us, and we’re paying full price?”
Cryptocurrency research firm Kairos Research noted that the increase in fees appears to have coincided with etherfi’s transition to Optimism. When etherfi was Scroll’s primary app, total daily transaction fees from that product averaged about $250. After multiplier increases began on March 31st, that amount jumped to about $16,000 per day.
L2BEAT clarified that the overcharging is not an issue with the sequencer as the L1 gas prices reported by Oracle are accurate. All overcharges were due to multiplier increases and went through a separate governance path involving the team’s multisig wallet.
This episode raises the question of whether Scroll was charging below cost to retain users. This is a common practice among L2s competing for activity, who suddenly revise their prices after the largest rate provider withdraws.
According to DeFiLlama, Scroll’s total lock (TVL) remains at just $24 million, down 96% from its peak of $585 million in October 2024.
This article was written with the help of AI Workflow. All of our stories are hand-picked, edited and fact-checked by humans.
