This article delves into Ethereum’s EIP-4844 to unravel the meaning of “blobs” and “blobspaces”.
Original title: "WTF is a Blob?"
Written by: 563, bankless
Compiled by Kate, Marsbit
We’ve been talking more and more about Blobs here at Bankless lately, and if you’re still a little confused about them, we don’t blame you. Well, we’re here today to refresh your memory on Ethereum’s near-term roadmap.
Today, 563 is going to dive headfirst into blobspace and show us that this is no big deal.
—The Bankless Team
If you’ve been following crypto throughout this bear market, you may have heard about Ethereum’s “rollup-based” roadmap. Through EIP-4844, the Ethereum mainnet is providing assistance for these scaling solutions by introducing a new concept called blobs.
Yes, blobs.
But what does a “blob” mean, and how does this help Ethereum’s long-term plans to scale via rollups? Let’s get started.
From full sharding to rollup
Sharding therefore involves randomly rotating validators among different shards (subgroups) of the blockchain, with each shard essentially being its own mini blockchain that runs in parallel to the beacon chain.
This is not a new idea in network design, running a bunch of parallel processes has been part of Ethereum’s plan for a long time.
The only problem? It’s a complex change that takes too long. As ethereum developers and researchers were strategizing on how best to implement sharding, a new challenger emerged: rollups.
Rather than breaking up the Ethereum main chain into its own mini blockchain, Rollups act as mini blockchains that run “on top” of Ethereum’s Layer 1 (hence Layer 2). When Vitalik wrote his “Rollup-centric Ethereum Roadmap” in 2020, it was already written on it:
“In my opinion, when [full implementation of sharding] finally arrives, basically no one will care about it. Everyone has adapted to a scroll-centric world whether we like it or not, and at that point it will be easier to continue down that path than to try to get everyone back to the base chain with no clear benefit and 20-100x lower scalability.”
Why EIP-4844 is a game changer
Now that the Ethereum community has overwhelmingly accepted rollups as the future, which improvements could have the biggest impact on the mainnet?
First, let’s briefly describe the blockchain’s responsibilities in the Ethereum-rollup relationship.
Ethereum’s original vision centered around sharding was to scale execution on mainnet. Now, as execution scales per rollup, this is no longer a priority.
How Ethereum and rollups play a role in modular blockchain architecture.
What are the issues today? Availability of data.
Rollups still need to publish transaction data (and fraud/validity proofs for settlement verification) back to L1 so that everyone has a complete picture of what’s happening across the network. Currently, this is a costly venture.
So while rollups help scale execution, Proto-Danksharding (PDS, with EIP-4844) is expected to help scale data availability via blobs.
Think of blobs as a new type of tool where rollups can efficiently store transaction and proof data, saving gas when sending this information to mainnet. This new type of transaction provides a better way for L2 to interact with L1 blockspace.
Schematic overview of transactions with blobs introduced by EIP-4844. Note that DAS will not be available until full Danksharding.
While the actual gas savings achieved by EIP-4844 will depend on the extent of blobs adoption, rough initial estimates suggest a 10-100x improvement in cumulative transaction costs.
Transactions on Ethereum L2 for pennies? Yes, please.
In fact, these fees could be so cheap that they could be completely subsidized by L2 orderers looking to generate some buzz in their network. Given that both Arbitrum and Optimism already run token incentive programs, this isn’t such a crazy idea. Who doesn’t want to transact for free?
The Great Decoupling
After the PDS update in EIP-4844, validators on Ethereum mainnet will be able to process both L1 execution and blobs (containing L2 data and settlement/proofs). The best part? For the first time, we will be able to have separate fee markets for these two sets of data.
Before EIP-4844, L1 gas fees directly affected rollup gas costs
After EIP-4844 = L2 blob and L1 execution fee markets are completely decoupled
Decoupling of fee markets was the main reason Visa chose Solana when selecting a network for stablecoin payments.
Over-hyped NFT minting on Ethereum mainnet will no longer affect DeFi users’ favorite rollups. Thanks to independent fee markets, these unnecessary entanglements will become a thing of the past.
Blobs will also inherit a "target allocation" of three blobs per block at this stage. Like EIP-1559, blob fees are kept with a running count to ensure that blobs don't clog the network. In this way, blobs and L1 execution transactions can coexist harmoniously on the base chain.
what happens
EIP-4844 is expected to go live with Ethereum’s next upgrade, Dencun, likely in January. After the mainnet update, rollups will have to undergo some upgrades so that they can correctly build blobs and send them to the mainnet.
Full Sharding (FDS) is further down the Ethereum roadmap due to its complexity, but will be a massive upgrade:
Data Availability Sampling (DAS) — Nodes don’t have to download the entire dataset to confirm the existence of the data. They only need to take a random sample (called a “data availability check”).
Blocks will be able to contain more blobs, and blobs can be larger, thanks to DAS.
The best part? Once FDS arrives, rollups won’t need to be upgraded to support it — they’ll just need the EIP-4844 upgrade.
With the launch of proto-danksharding, the rollup-centric roadmap officially begins, laying the foundation for Ethereum’s next chapter. So, when you enjoy essentially free transactions on your favorite L2 next summer, remember to thank your friendly neighbors for it.