Vitalik posted on Twitter on the 28th, using Blob, PeerDAS and other technologies as an entry point to think about the future development opportunities and concerns of Ethereum and Rollups. Encryption researcher Haotian analyzed and summarized the article and looks forward to Rollups developing in a good direction.
This article is compiled and compiled by Lianxin. If you have any questions, please refer to the original text.
Background knowledge: Blob and Rollups relationship
Blob is a temporary data package that is decoupled from EVM calldata and can be directly called by the consensus layer. The direct benefit is that EVM does not need to access Blob data when executing transactions, so it does not incur high execution layer computing costs.
Currently, due to balancing a series of factors, the size of a Blob is 128kb, and a batch transaction to the mainnet can carry up to two Blobs. The ideal design is for a block to ultimately carry a 16MB packet of approximately 128 blobs.
Therefore, the Rollup project team must balance factors such as the number of Blob blocks, TPS transaction capacity, and Blob mainnet node storage costs as much as possible, with the goal of using the Blob space with the most cost-effective performance.
Taking Optimism as an example, there are currently about 500,000 transactions a day. On average, a batch of transactions is sent to the main network every two minutes, carrying one Blob data package at a time. Of course, you can also carry two blobs at a time, but because TPS is currently not used, the capacity of each blob will not be full, and only additional storage costs will be incurred.
(What impact will the Cancun upgrade have on users? Focused summary of Ramble Bar, an offline gathering of Lian News)
Haotian believes that the performance of Ethereum after the Cancun upgrade (Dencun) is sufficient and proves this with various opinions; on the other hand, Vitalik also expressed concerns about the future development of Rollup.
Opportunities for future development of Rollups
Blob usage space has great potential
Since the amount of data carried by Ethereum mainnet blocks is affected by Gas Limit and storage costs, it is ideal for a Slot block to carry up to 128 Blobs. Optimism currently only uses one every two minutes, leaving it for the Layer 2 project to improve TPS. , There is still a lot of room to expand the market and ecological prosperity.
Therefore, for a period of time after the Cancun upgrade, Rollup did not compete in terms of the number of blobs used, frequency of use, and use of blob space bidding.
The reason Vitalik mentioned Blobscription is because this type of project can temporarily increase transaction volume and increase Blob usage.
(What opportunities and risks will BlobScriptions bring?)
As rollup transaction volume increases, there are currently other potential solutions:
Compress the transaction volume of each Batch to allow the Blob space to accommodate as many transactions as possible;
Increase the number of blobs;
Reduce the frequency of Batch transactions;
Can be further expanded: Blob+DAS
What if one day the Layer 2 market prospers to a certain extent and the current Blob data package is increased to 128 Blobs per block and it is not enough? The Ethereum development team has already come up with a solution: using Data Availability Sampling (DAS).
Blob +DAS improves performance
A simple understanding is to distribute the data that originally needed to be stored in one node to multiple nodes at the same time. For example, each node stores 1/8 of the Blob data. Eight nodes form a group to meet the original DA capabilities. This is equivalent to dividing the current DA capabilities. The Blob storage capacity has been expanded by 8 times, which is actually what will be done in the future sharding stage.
Interestingly, Vitalik has reiterated this view many times and seems to be warning the Layer 2 project team not to always complain about the high cost of Ethereum data availability. The current TPS has not developed the capabilities of the Blob data package to the extreme, and it should quickly increase its firepower for development. Ecology and user expansion, don’t always think about DA running away.
Crisis for the future development of Rollups
Vitalik believes that among the current mainstream rollup projects, only Arbitrum has reached Stage 1. Although projects such as DeGate and Fuel have reached Stage 2, these projects are not yet familiar to the general public and are not mainstream.
Stage 2 is the ultimate goal of Rollup security. Currently, only a handful of Rollups have reached Stage 1, while most Rollups are in Stage 0. It can be seen that the development of the Rollup industry really worries Vitalik.
Looking forward to the growth of Rollups and Ethereum together
To sum up the above, Haotian believes that Vitalik’s article thinking about Ethereum’s future expansion plan has inspired the market. In particular, it expresses dissatisfaction with the current development status of Layer 2, but also gives optimistic affirmation to the performance of Blob, and hopes that Rollups and Ethereum can develop positively.
The only uncertainty now is left to Layer2 to decide, how should Ethereum develop?
This article explains the opportunities and challenges Vitalik sees for Rollups. It first appeared on Chain News ABMedia.
