Arbitrum One Gas Tracker

Arbitrum One is an Optimistic Rollup: it executes every transaction on its own chain using the Arbitrum Nitro stack, then periodically posts compressed batches of transaction data back to Ethereum as the record of what happened. Your fee is really two numbers added together — an L2 execution fee for the compute and storage Arbitrum itself performs, and an L1 data fee, your transaction's share of the cost of posting that batch to Ethereum. Both are paid in ETH, not ARB; the ARB token is used for Arbitrum DAO governance and has nothing to do with paying for gas.

The L2 execution fee follows an EIP-1559-shaped mechanism of its own, scaled to a far higher throughput target than Ethereum mainnet. In practice, Arbitrum's own base fee spends almost all its time pinned near its floor, moving only when sustained demand pushes the chain past its built-in speed limit. The L1 data fee is the volatile half: it is calculated from Ethereum's own base fee at the moment your batch is posted, so a spike in mainnet gas raises what you pay on Arbitrum too, just scaled down to your small share of a shared batch.

That balance shifted after Ethereum's March 2024 Dencun upgrade let rollups post data into blobs instead of regular calldata. Blobs trade on their own separate, far cheaper market, so the L1 data fee — once the majority of an Arbitrum transaction's cost — now typically accounts for a small fraction of what you pay. Execution is usually the larger line item today, a reversal of how the fee used to break down.

Because Arbitrum's own execution fee rarely moves, most of the variation you will see on this tracker traces back to conditions outside Arbitrum itself.

• Ethereum L1 congestion — The L1 data fee is priced off mainnet's base fee in real time. When Ethereum gas spikes during a mint or liquidation cascade, Arbitrum's total fee ticks up with it, even though nothing changed on Arbitrum.
• Sequencer throughput — The sequencer orders transactions and handles far more per second than Ethereum can. The L2 execution fee only rises when sustained activity pushes demand past that speed limit, which is rare outside major app-specific spikes.
• Blob market demand — Since Dencun, Arbitrum shares Ethereum's blob capacity with every other rollup posting data at the same time. Heavy blob demand across the whole L2 ecosystem, not just Arbitrum, can nudge the data-posting fee up.
• App-specific congestion — A popular perps launch, points campaign, or token generation event concentrated on Arbitrum can briefly push execution demand toward the speed limit — the one scenario where the L2 fee itself moves noticeably.

Most of the confusion around Arbitrum fees comes from assuming they work exactly like Ethereum's, or exactly like ARB is involved. Neither is quite right.

• Keep ETH, not ARB, for gas — Holding ARB does not cover transaction fees. Every Arbitrum transaction, including ones that interact with ARB itself, is paid in ETH.
• Withdrawals take longer than deposits — Moving assets from Arbitrum back to Ethereum through the official bridge means waiting out a roughly seven-day fraud-proof challenge period. Third-party liquidity bridges can get funds to you faster for a fee; depositing onto Arbitrum has no such delay.
• A quoted fee can go stale fast — Because part of your fee tracks Ethereum's base fee in real time, an estimate shown a few seconds before you submit can be off if mainnet gas moves in that window. Leave a small buffer rather than trusting an old quote exactly.