Who Really Pays for “Free” Blockchains?
Open any L2 today, and the view is the same; on the whitepaper, we see fractions of a cent per transaction, instant swaps, and airdrops for showing up early. It feels like the industry finally cracked free infrastructure, but it didn’t.
Cheap execution, “free” points programs, and sub-cent fees are not the absence of cost. In my opinion, they’re cost that have been moved somewhere less visible. This piece follows the money through three places it likes to hide: rollup sequencers, airdrop farming, and token unlock schedules.
The Sequencer Tax
Every rollup needs someone to order transactions and post data back to Ethereum. That someone is the sequencer, and in 2026 the sequencer business is one of the best margin structures in crypto (for the operator, not the user). Since Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade cut the cost of posting rollup data to the base layer by ~90%, the spread between...
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