  Late 2023 witnessed significant user activity on EVM chains, resulting in a
surge in transaction activity and putting many rollups into the first live
test. While some rollups performed well, some others experienced downtime
during this period, affecting transaction finality time and gas fees. To
address the lack of empirical research on rollups, we perform the first study
during a heightened activity during the late 2023 transaction boom, as
attributed to inscriptions - a novel technique that enables NFT and ERC-20
token creation on Bitcoin and other blockchains. We observe that minting
inscription-based meme tokens on zkSync Era allows for trading at a fraction of
the costs, compared to the Bitcoin or Ethereum networks. We also found that the
increased transaction activity, over 99% attributed to the minting of new
inscription tokens, positively affected other users of zkSync Era, resulting in
lowered gas fees. Unlike L1 blockchains, ZK rollups may experience lower gas
fees with increased transaction volume. Lastly, the introduction of blobs - a
form of temporary data storage - decreased the gas costs of Ethereum rollups,
but also raised a number of questions about the security of inscription-based
tokens.
