Arbitrum Glamsterdam Update Lifts Batch Gas Charge From 210K To 480K

Arbitrum is preparing for Ethereum's Glamsterdam upgrade, and the price of posting its data to Ethereum changes with it. The Arbitrum Glamsterdam update is a proposal to raise two fee settings on Arbitrum One and Arbitrum Nova. Parameter one moves from 10 to 16. Parameter two moves from 210,000 to 480,000.

What the Arbitrum Glamsterdam update changes

Arbitrum charges users an L1 fee that estimates what it costs to post their transactions to Ethereum. Two parameters feed that estimate. The first, parentGasFloorPerToken, mirrors Ethereum's minimum gas charge for calldata. The second, perBatchGasCharge, covers a fixed cost attached to every batch.

The proposal moves the first from 10 to 16 and the second from 210,000 to 480,000. That is a rise of 60% and about 129%, our arithmetic from the table. It says the new values rest on measured post-Glamsterdam batch costs.

The parameter table in the proposal on the Arbitrum forum. Source: Arbitrum governance forum.

A gate holds the Arbitrum Glamsterdam update until the fork

The change does not take effect early. The proposal includes an onchain check, called GlamsterdamForkGateAction, that blocks execution until Glamsterdam is live on Ethereum. Any earlier attempt reverts.

It needs no new Nitro software and no new ArbOS version. The DAO would call two existing owner functions on each chain. Offchain Labs is covering the engineering and the third-party audit, so the proposal costs the DAO nothing.

What the Arbitrum Glamsterdam update means for users

The proposal says plainly that the change will affect the L1 fee component users pay. It does not give a dollar figure, and neither do we. The thread opened on October 7, and Entropy put the temperature check on Snapshot on October 15 on behalf of Offchain.

The authors add a caveat of their own. The new values may underestimate the gas paid for zero bytes in calldata. They call the effect minimal because zero bytes are rare and both chains post blobs. A later ArbOS version could address it.

Snapshot vote and one open question

The temperature check on Snapshot shows about 24.0 million ARB for, 7,327 against and 839 abstaining, from 541 voters. It runs until October 22. Because the proposal is constitutional, an onchain vote follows once the audit and final code are published.

The Snapshot results panel for the Arbitrum Glamsterdam update, with times shown in East Africa Time. Source: Snapshot.

On the forum, the delegate cp0x wrote on October 18 that they support the temperature check. They said the payload in pull request 384 matches the proposal text. They raised one point. The new batch charge assumes a cost of about 353,000 gas per batch after Glamsterdam, with no gas refunder. Today's roughly 171,000 on Arbitrum One is measured with one.

They asked the team to confirm that the batch poster will run without the refunder by the time the proposal executes. They also asked how much of the 2.07 times increase comes from that change, as opposed to the Ethereum upgrade itself. Another delegate, TodayInDeFi, asked for the audit and test results to be published before the final onchain vote.