Written by: Rose
Compiled by: TechFlow
This episode of Kernel Talk invited Dankrad Feist, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation. As the person who proposed the new sharding design and the concept of Danksharding, Dankrad shared in this interview the next plan, value, and new use cases brought by Proto-Danksharding. As a cryptocurrency venture capital fund focused on supporting the developer community and the world's most creative innovators, Kernel Ventures is full of expectations for the future development of Ethereum and Danksharding.
1. What’s next for Danksharding after Proto-Danksharding?
Proto-Danksharding is designed to make it very easy to upgrade, so it basically already uses all the cryptography and basic components that we need to do sharding. This means that we can upgrade gradually without having to hard fork Ethereum again. So all the next steps will be things that we can do at the network level. And we may be able to implement some plans soon.
For example, we can make some optimizations to transfer blobs over the network more efficiently, which will allow for a small amount of scaling, maybe doubling or quadrupling the number of commitments we can allow. This will probably happen within half a year to a year after initial implementation.
2. What is the biggest added value that Danksharding brings? Does the implementation of Danksharding make the emergence of some kind of new application possible? What else can we expect?
The biggest value-add of Danksharding is providing a scalable data availability layer. On Rollups, a large number of transactions can be processed, which means that transactions will be cheaper. To me, this means that we are finally ready to realize the full potential of cryptocurrency. Not only can this be achieved, but it can be used by a large number of users, just as people imagined when Ethereum was designed and built in the early days of 2014, 2015. I think the possibilities are endless and we will see a lot. Even basic applications like payments will be a huge application after we finally make it cheap and scalable.
3. Do Optimistic Rollup and zk-Rollup gain the same benefits from Proto-Danksharding and Danksharding?
In general, yes, for Optimistic Rollup and zk-Rollup, what they need is a data availability layer in order to have cheap transactions and scalability. This brings them more data than the core data on Ethereum today. They can benefit from it in the same way, just maybe slightly differently in the specific details of implementing the blockchain.
4. What do you think about storage after Ethereum sharding? Do you see any projects doing this?
Basically, Ethereum won't be responsible for the state of the Rollups. If Ethereum is responsible for publishing all the data needed to update the state, but the state itself, the Rollups will have to figure out how to maintain it and potentially how to incentivize its maintenance. That's somewhat up to them. I think there are some ideas and solutions emerging. But it depends on the size of the Rollup, and for the Rollups we see now, I don't think it's a major issue because the state is still small enough that even without a specific incentive, it won't be lost and will always exist. But if you want to design Rollups with larger states, which I think people absolutely should do, then it's worth thinking about how to incentivize it.
5. Do you see any new use cases enabled by Proto-Danksharding, such as social or gaming? What new or exciting use cases are you looking forward to?
Certainly, as you mentioned, social and gaming will ultimately benefit from having cheaper transactions. For social applications, I find this very interesting because that's one application that doesn't necessarily rely on any real-world bridge, like financial applications, if you can get security on Ethereum, that's obviously a pretty tricky problem from a regulatory perspective. But in social and gaming, there's a lot we can do without necessarily needing this. So I'm definitely looking forward to seeing that. I think all of this will be enabled by having a scalable base layer.
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