Why EIP-4844 blobs cut rollup costs, and why danksharding is still the end game
Post171 words
Explains EIP-4844 blob transactions, which give rollups dedicated, non-permanent data space with a separate fee market, versus calldata that competes with L1 activity. Without DAS it is only a one-off capacity increase.
Key claims
About 90% of current rollup cost is attributable to calldata
Blobs have a separate fee market and are not stored permanently
Full danksharding with DAS remains the long-term end game
By introducing a novel transaction type (the same format that will be used in danksharding), EIP-4844 will provide rollups exclusive data space (a.k.a. blobs) to post data to.
This will significantly reduce rollup cost, as roughly 90% of the current cost base is attributable to calldata cost.
Calldata is not separated from the fee markets of general execution on L1, stored within Ethereum blocks forever and spikes in L1 activity can hence adversely impact calldata cost, subsequently increasing fees on rollup execution layers.
Data blobs on the other hand are not permanently stored on Ethereum, which prevents state bloat risks, have a separate fee market and will provide a much cheaper DA option to rollup L2s than calldata.
However, in the absence of data availability sampling, this is simply a one-off increase of the block space available to rollups. The long-term end game remains a full danksharding implementation with data shards and data availability sampling across shards.
For more on this, stay tuned for my research report on data availability! 👀
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