These "rollups" process transactions off-chain and bundle them, significantly reducing the load on the Ethereum Mainnet.
In 2022, Ethereum transaction fees (gas) experienced a significant and sustained drop, reaching their lowest levels in years. Contrary to popular belief, Why the Merge Didn't Lower Fees The Merge was a consensus change. It replaced miners with validators to secure the network.
While the Merge improved Ethereum's energy efficiency by 99%, fee reduction is being addressed through . This phase of the roadmap focuses on "sharding" and "data blobs" (EIP-4844), which specifically aim to make Layer 2 transactions even cheaper and increase overall network throughput.