NEAR Protocol modular bull case: DA cost, fast finality and chain abstraction
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Long-form case for NEAR in the modular stack. Cites Dune data for a 10-day Arbitrum-stack DA cost of $16.2M on Ethereum, $2,840 on Celestia and $87.62 on NEAR, plus an EigenLayer fast finality layer and chain abstraction.
Key claims
10-day DA cost: Ethereum $16,207,224, Celestia $2,839.91, NEAR $87.62
Fast finality in 3-4 seconds
DA was 80-90% of rollup fees before EIP-4844
🧱✨Modularity Bull Case for NEAR Protocol 🧱✨
TLDR;
✦ Modularity today is broken
✦ Scalable, cheap and reliable DA solution
✦ @eigencloud-powered fast finality layer
✦ Chain Abstraction to unify UX across chains
@NEARProtocol will lead the modular narrative. Time for an alpha-packed research summary so you can position yourself accordingly anon.
💎 NEAR Protocol Alpha Summary
The modular thesis evolves around separating the core functions of a blockchain (or rollup) into distinct, functional layers that are optimized to serve a specific use case.
These layers include:
✦ Execution
✦ Settlement
✦ Consensus
✦ Data Availability (DA)
@NEARProtocol can basically serve all of these functions within the modular stack. However, it is especially powerful as a DA layer or fast finality layer that sits in between execution layer (the rollup) and the settlement layer (Ethereum).
NEAR DA
NEAR DA is a groundbreaking innovation that offers robust, cost-efficient data availability guarantees to rollups on Ethereum.
Thanks to its sharded network architecture, @NEARProtocol is able to handle much larger data quantities than Ethereum. This makes posting data much cheaper.
NEAR DA is set to launch with a number of high-profile integrations, including @MadaraStarknet, @Calderaxyz, @fluentxyz, @vistaralabs, @Dymension RollApps, and @movementlabsxyz.
DA is the main scalability bottleneck for rollups on Ethereum and even post-EIP4844, Ethereum blob space will be much more expensive than block space on NEAR Protocol.
Before EIP-4844, DA cost accounted for around 80-90% of rollup fees and even now, DA is still the most significant cost component.
Additionally, EIP-4844 only marks a one-off increase in the data space that is available to rollups to post their data to. While it makes posting data to L1 cheaper in the short term, it is not a long-term solution.
Scalable, cheap and battle-tested DA layers like @NEARProtocol hence address real demand and solve the main problem that rollups face today.
Currently, NEAR provides the cheapest DA layer and the highest level of data throughput capacity in the market.
How that translates into real cost-savings is evidenced by the below @DuneAnalytics data. Assuming a rollup based on the @arbitrum stack, historical 10 day DA cost would amount to:
✦ Ethereum: $16,207,224.26
✦ Celestia: $2,839.91
✦ NEAR Protocol: $87.62
The 10 week savings by a rollup using @NEARProtocol would have hence amounted to > $16M! 🤯
NEAR Fast Finality
In partnership with @eigencloud, NEAR is also building the world's first fast finality layer for Ethereum L2s. This groundbreaking development will significantly reduce transaction finality from minutes or hours to just 3-4 seconds.
The cost of settlement on this new finality layer will be up to 4'000 times cheaper than on Ethereum. Additionally, this will reduce liquidity fragmentation between L2s that share the fast finality layer.
The collaboration will also transition the NEAR-Ethereum Rainbow Bridge to an actively validated service (AVS) secured by @eigencloud's restaking mechanism.
The Future is Modular.
Using NEAR and other modular infrastructure building blocks, we can piece together highly optimized rollups that are extremely performant and can finally support use cases and applications ready for mass adoption.
However, there is one huge problem that as of now, basically makes the modular thesis fall apart.
Fragmentation.
With the growing number of L1/L2 execution layers, users and liquidity are increasingly fragmented across ecosystems. This leads to a poor UX and puts the modularity narrative as a whole in a different spot to compete with the seamless UX of monolithic stacks.
@NEARProtocol fixes that by introducing a ground-breaking concept.
Chain Abstraction.
@NEARProtocol leverages Account aggregation to enable seamless transacting across any chain using a single account.
This is basically Account Abstraction on steroids, anon.
Account aggregation enables users to have addresses on any chain & move assets between them freely, controlling all accounts from one over-arching, programmable NEAR account.
@NEARProtocol will launch the next version of FastAuth in March 2024, which will introduce mapping for NEAR addresses to EVM, Bitcoin & others.
The scalable DA guarantees that the NEAR base layer provides and the high degree of verifiability (for light clients, end users, etc.) is key to enable the vision of Chain Abstraction.
Don't fade NEAR anon. 🪬✨
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