The future of rollup costs: calldata, EIP-4488 and EIP-4844
Thread578 words
Explains why calldata dominates rollup fees and how EIP-4488 and EIP-4844 blobs reduce it. Argues that post-4844 optimistic rollups may be temporarily cheaper than zk rollups, but long term most ORs become ZKRs.
Key claims
Calldata is 80-90% of rollup fees
EIP-4844 offers about 1MB average per block and roughly 100x cheaper fees, with blobs pruned after 30 days
Optimistic rollups may have a cost edge over zk rollups for a while
0/ when #rollups post data to $ETH L1, they pay for calldata, a type of read-only data used by smart contracts for external calls
calldata cost accounts for +80-90% of rollup fees ⚠️
but with EIP4488 and EIP4844, this is set to change 🚀
🧵 on the future of rollup cost (0/17)
1/ so ollups currently utilize L1 calldata for data storage, which is limited to ~10KB per block and with a fixed price of 16 gas / byte is very expensive
2/ alternative DA solutions (e.g. DACs) can address this. When we remove data availability requirements from Ethereum for an L2s, the transaction cost of an #L2 goes to dirt cheap
less than $0.01 in the case of @MetisDAO which is a good example of this
3/ but having DA off-chain comes with a trade-off between cost and security
not surprisingly, there are hence initiatives that aim to reduce the cost rollups incur when posting data to L1
let's have a look 👇
4/ EIP-4488
#EIP4488 reduces the calldata cost from 16 to 3 gas per byte, with a cap on calldata per block to mitigate security risks (state bloat)
5/ #EIP4844 does not directly increase L1 data capacity, but rather balances cost of execution with cost of data in favor of rollups, while retaining a similar max capacity
6/ this rebalancing means that the average data usage of available capacity will go up, max capacity doesn't. So long-term we definitely need (dank)sharding for the capacity increase, but short-term we get to enjoy lower rollup fees (could reduce rollup costs by up to 80%)
7/ EIP-4844
#EIP4844 is a first step towards Danksharding which will massively reduce the rollup calldata cost using a newly proposed transaction type
8/ this provides a 1MB average per block storage with (based on estimations) 100x cheaper fees for rollups
but let's dive in 👇
9/ #EIP4844 introduces a new type of transaction called blob carrying transaction. These are normal transactions with some extra data. These blobs are larger and cheaper in comparison to calldata
10/ however, this data is not accessible to #EVM execution. The Blob data will only store on the consensus layer and only the commitments of these blobs are accessible to EVM
11/ as this is not a full-sharding the nodes still needs to validate the data availability. That is the reason the data is only limited to 1MB per block instead of 16Mb
12/ this data will be prune after 30 days to release the nodes burden with extra data and storage
13/ what is also interesting is that when the blob-carrying transactions EIP is implemented, it's very likely optimistic rollups on #Ethereum will be cheaper than zk rollups at that point
14/ with the cost of calldata pretty much resetting to zero, the bottleneck will be the rollup's own costs. With significantly lower proving and batch costs for optimistic rollups, they might have an edge over #zk-rollups for a while
15/ of course though, #zk-rollups have many other advantages, and over time we'll see proving & verification costs plummet as the tech matures, as well as sequencers & provers are optimized
16/ long term, I still expect most ORs to become ZKRs & replace their fraud proving systems with validity proofs
17/ for more on #EIP4844, check my thread below 👇
x.com/expctchaos/status/1532100096111824901
tagging L2/modular chads🫡 👇
@DeFiMinty
@Only1temmy
@Slappjakke
@Louround_
@thesaint_
@0xSalazar
@CryptoShiro_
@jake_pahor
@ViktorDefi
@stacy_muur
@Flowslikeosmo
@ShivanshuMadan
@0xShivani
@hmalviya9
@daddysether
@bitsplaining
@kunalgoel
@hooeem
@redvelvetzip
@0xDinoEggs
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