Transaction costs on major rollups have fallen to fractions of a cent. Users benefit unambiguously. The networks themselves now collect very little, because fee revenue was mostly a pass-through of data costs that no longer exist at the old level.
What is left to monetise
Three candidates. Priority ordering, which means selling sequencing rights and accepting the centralisation questions that follow. Application-layer capture, where the network operates products on top of its own chain. Or subsidy from a treasury, which is not a business model so much as a runway.
Why this is not a crisis
Cheap settlement is the point. Payment networks and tokenised asset venues need predictable sub-cent costs, and a chain that cannot offer that will not host them. The revenue question is real, but it is a question about who captures value in a growing system, not whether the system works.
Watch which rollups publish sequencer revenue openly. Transparency here is currently voluntary and highly informative.
Cheap blockspace, thin margins
Lower data costs delivered the user experience the ecosystem promised and removed the revenue that funded sequencer operations.
Sustainable models will likely come from services layered above execution rather than from transaction fees. That transition is underway and unfinished.
