The average gas fee for Blobs rose exponentially on Wednesday, roughly five hours after a new protocol called Etherscriptions introduced a way to inscribe data onto blobs.

These Ethereum-based inscriptions, dubbed “BlobScriptions” have sent the blob base fee up to 14,499,530 wei at one point, according to data from Ethernow.xyz shared by Blocknative CEO Matt Cutler on X. Wei is the smallest denomination of ether (ETH) and is often used when referring to gas prices on the network.

Blobs were first introduced with EIP-4844 in the Dencun upgrade, which was deployed on the Ethereum mainnet on March 13. Before the hard fork upgrade, rollups had to store information such as transaction history within calldata, which was expensive as calldata had to be stored forever.

After Dencun, however, the rollups could post data to a new blobspace in the form of “blobs” where the information isn’t stored forever, making transactions much cheaper with the added benefit of similar security guarantees.

The fact that blobs are not stored forever, and only last for 4096 epochs or roughly 18 days, means that these inscriptions will expire.

So far, the majority of inscriptions minted to blobs appear to be images, with the most recent ones depicting pixelated cats. At the time of writing, data compiled by “@hildobby” on Dune showed that 9,122 inscriptions had been minted and 45% of blob submitters over the last four hours were inscriptions.

“Ethereum is already very congested, so don’t play with blob inscriptions, which will cause a surge in [layer 2] transaction fees. Several bytes of data occupy 128kb of storage space, wasting a large amount of onchain resources,” said one industry watcher on X.