Just when you thought the blockchain shindig was over, Ethereum developers are dusting off their party hats for the next big bash. Fresh off the confetti-strewn dancefloor of the successful Shapella upgrade, the devs are already curating the playlist for their next monumental change — the “Dencun” upgrade. Now, don’t go mistaking ‘Dencun’ for an exotic cocktail or a new Fortnite dance move. It’s the trendy nickname for the upcoming Ethereum hard fork, expected to drop like a hot new summer hit in the second half of 2023.
The star of the Dencun party is a groovy proposal known as EIP 4844, or as the cool kids call it, “proto-danksharding”. This isn’t some nerdy lingo invented during a late-night coding session. The name hails from the brainiacs who proposed the concept, Protolambda and Dankrad Feist. This dynamic duo figured out a way to significantly reduce the cost of adding data from transactions to the L1 Ethereum, a.k.a. the main Ethereum blockchain.
If you’re scratching your head wondering, ‘What’s a rollup?’ picture this: a busy city bus packed with passengers, trying to navigate rush-hour traffic — that’s a rollup. It’s a clever way of bundling thousands of transactions into one, kind of like cramming an army of clowns into a tiny car, and then posting the data to Ethereum’s L1 layer. But, just like that car is gonna need a ton of fuel, storing this data forever on-chain makes the single transaction quite expensive.
This is where our hero, proto-danksharding, swoops in to save the day with its superpower: blob-carrying transactions. These are like regular transactions but with an additional binary large object, or ‘blob’, attached. Picture this blob as a giant, inflatable beach ball attached to our city bus, carrying all the data.
Here’s the magic part: these blobs carry the data to the L1, but instead of parking it permanently on the chain (which would be like renting a forever home for our beach ball), the data is sent to the nodes on the consensus layer, and then vanishes after one to three months. It’s like a magic trick that makes the beach ball disappear, reducing the cost of data from rollups to L1 Ethereum and potentially slashing transaction fees by at least 10x! Abracadabra, indeed!
But hold onto your party hats, folks, because there’s another feature of EIP-4844 that’ll have you reaching for the confetti cannon. It introduces a multi-dimensional fee market based on EIP-1559, which means our blob-carrying transactions don’t have to battle other transactions for block space. It’s like getting VIP access at the club, further reducing the fees for pushing rollup data to L1 Ethereum and making the party even more affordable for rollup users.
As if this party wasn’t rocking enough, proto-danksharding is only the opening act for Ethereum’s main event: Danksharding. Instead of splitting the blockchain into smaller parts (like chopping a pizza into slices), it plans to beef up the amount of data carried on blob-carrying transactions from 0.5 MB to a whopping 30 MB. But don’t worry, we won’t need bigger servers (or a largerpizza box) to handle this data deluge. The solution lies in a technique called data availability sampling (DAS), which is like taste-testing a few slices to ensure the whole pizza is delicious. This clever trick means that nodes can verify the availability of data without having to download the entire block, keeping the system efficient and secure.
In Zktube, we have been preparing for this party for a looong, Loong time, we are fully ready for the new exciting fun. We believ the Dencun upgrade, in all its glory, is like the biggest, baddest party on the blockchain block. It’s a game-changing mixtape of scalability, reduced costs, and maintained decentralization, all set to drop in late 2023. So, put on your dancing shoes and get ready to groove to the rhythm of the Ethereum beat. With the Zktube DJ at the decks, it’s going to be a blockchain bash that’s out of this world!
