Scroll Users Paid $50K in Excess Fees After Team Cranked L1 Fees by 1,280x

Users on Scroll, an Ethereum Layer 2 (L2) network, paid more than $50,000 in excess transaction fees over roughly four days after the team behind the project repeatedly raised the parameters that determine how much users pay for posting data to Ethereum, according to an analysis published by L2BEAT.

The overcharges stemmed from six manual increases to two fee multipliers on Scroll's gas price oracle, the smart contract that calculates the Layer 1 data portion of every transaction's cost. Each update raised the previous value by 2x to 10x, compounding to 1,280x the original baseline by April 5, L2BEAT said. On April 9, the team slashed both multipliers by 160x.

The baseline cost for all roughly 139,000 affected transactions would have been just $280. Instead, users collectively paid upward of $50,000, with automated bots accounting for the vast majority.

Scroll has not publicly addressed the findings at the time of writing.

Etherfi Cash bots, which are still running during the protocol's ongoing migration to Optimism, accounted for roughly $35,000, or 66% of the excess, per L2BEAT. Scroll's own oracle relayer paid approximately $5,200, with LayerZero, Succinct, and other bots making up the rest.

The issue was first flagged by a pseudonymous developer running a Succinct relayer, who posted on X that their transaction costs had jumped from $0.002 to over $20.

"Scroll was subsidizing L1 DA costs and is now correcting to sustainable pricing?" the developer asked. "And there's no users on Scroll except us, so we're paying full price for it?"

Crypto research firm Kairos Research noted that the fee spike appeared to coincide with etherfi's migration to Optimism. When etherfi was Scroll's dominant app, total daily transaction fees from its products averaged about $250. After the multiplier increases began on March 31, that figure jumped to roughly $16,000 per day.

L2BEAT clarified that the overcharges were not a sequencer issue, as the L1 gas prices reported by the oracle were accurate. The entire overcharge came from the multiplier increases, which went through a separate governance path involving the team's multisig wallet.

The episode raises the question of whether Scroll had been running fees below cost to retain users, a common practice among L2s competing for activity, and abruptly repriced once its largest fee contributor departed.

Scroll’s total value locked (TVL) sits at just $24 million, according to DeFiLlama, down 96% from its peak of $585 millon in October 2024.

This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.