According to FORESIGHTNEWS: Qi Zhou, the founder of EthStorage, recently discussed the importance of data availability (DA) in Ethereum's upgrade roadmap, specifically the role of EIP-4844. The Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 4844 aims to provide a simple and forward-compatible solution for data availability, which is a crucial aspect of Ethereum 2.0.
DA, as defined by Dankrad, ensures that no one can prevent access to data, especially when the data is submitted to the Layer 1 network through transactions. The current data upload mechanism, called Gossip or broadcast, is inefficient due to communication redundancy. Ethereum aims to implement a scaling solution that allows users to submit large amounts of data without requiring other nodes to download all blocks to verify data availability.
The upgrade roadmap for Ethereum is centered around Rollups, with DA being used to store or upload all transaction data for the entire Rollup. Optimistic Rollup, a major type of Rollup, requires all users to access their Layer 2 transaction data and allows anyone to construct their L2 state in a permissionless manner.
EIP-4844 introduces Binary Large Objects (BLOBs) as the minimum storage unit for Ethereum DA. BLOBs have a fixed size of 128KB, and transactions can submit multiple BLOBs. The proposal also provides two interfaces for working with DA, allowing for forward compatibility with future Ethereum DA implementations.
One of the main reasons for separating data and data hashes is to enable nodes to ensure data availability through random sampling without downloading all data. EIP-4844 can be used to create a Layer 2 decentralized storage model, significantly improving the interactive process of fraud proof.
However, EIP-4844 faces some challenges, such as the lack of support for new instruction levels in Solidity. To address this, a library has been developed using Solidity language and Solidity assembly to support new OPCODEs. Additionally, EIP-4844 discards data after approximately 18 days to reduce storage overhead, prompting the development of the EthStorage project to establish a storage incentive mechanism and distribute storage fees to data providers, with the goal of expanding Ethereum's storage capacity by 1000 times and reducing storage costs by the same factor.
