Vitalik tweeted on the 28th, discussing the future development opportunities and concerns of Ethereum and Rollups through technologies such as Blob and PeerDAS. Cryptocurrency researcher Haotian analyzed the article and concluded that he looks forward to positive developments in Rollups.
Background: Relationship between Blob and Rollups
Opportunities for future development of Rollups
Blob has great potential for space utilization
Further scalability: Blob+DAS
Crisis in the future development of Rollups
Looking forward to the growth of Rollups and Ethereum together
Blob is a temporary data package that can be directly called by the consensus layer and is decoupled from EVM calldata. The direct benefit is that EVM does not need to access Blob data when executing transactions, so it does not incur higher execution layer computation costs.
Currently, due to a balance of various factors, the size of a Blob is 128kb, and a batch of transactions sent to the mainnet can carry a maximum of two Blobs. The ideal design is for a block to eventually carry 16MB, approximately 128 Blobs of data packages.
Therefore, the Rollup project team aims to balance the number of Blob blocks, TPS transaction capacity, Blob mainnet node storage costs, and other factors, with the goal of using Blob space in the most cost-effective manner.
Taking Optimism as an example, there are currently about 500,000 transactions per day, with an average of one transaction batched to the mainnet every two minutes, carrying one Blob data package. Of course, it is also possible to carry two Blobs at once, but because the current TPS does not require it, the capacity of each Blob is not full, which only increases additional storage costs.
Haotian believes that after the Dencun upgrade, Ethereum’s performance is already sufficient, which has been proven from various perspectives. On the other hand, Vitalik also expressed concerns about the future development of Rollups.
Due to the influence of the Gas Limit and storage costs on the amount of data carried by Ethereum mainnet blocks, it is ideal for one Slot block to carry a maximum of 128 Blobs. Currently, Optimism only uses one every two minutes, leaving plenty of room for Layer2 projects to improve TPS, expand the market, and promote ecological prosperity.
Therefore, for some time after the Dencun upgrade, there is no competition among Rollups in terms of the number, frequency, and bidding of Blob usage.
The reason why Vitalik mentioned Blobscription is because projects of this kind can temporarily increase transaction volume, thereby increasing Blob usage.
When the transaction volume of Rollup increases, there are currently other potential solutions:
Compress the transaction volume of each batch to allow more transactions to be accommodated in Blob space.
Increase the number of Blobs.
Shorten the frequency of batch transactions.
If one day the Layer2 market flourishes to a certain degree and the current Blob data package is not enough at 128 Blobs per block, what should be done? The Ethereum development team has long provided a solution: using Data Availability Sampling (DAS) technology.
Blob + DAS improves performance
Simply put, it distributes the data that originally needed to be stored in one node to multiple nodes. For example, each node stores 1/8 of the Blob data, and eight nodes form a small group to meet the original DA capability, which is equivalent to expanding the Blob storage capacity by 8 times. This is also what will be done in the future shard phase.
Interestingly, Vitalik has reiterated this view many times, seemingly warning Layer2 project parties not to always complain about the high cost of Ethereum data availability, as the current TPS has not fully developed the ability of Blob data packages. They should speed up development and expansion of the ecosystem and user base, instead of always thinking about DA escaping.
Vitalik believes that currently, only Arbitrum has reached Stage 1 among mainstream rollup projects, and no mainstream project has reached Stage 2. While Haotian gave examples that projects like DeGate and Fuel have already reached Stage 2, these projects are not familiar to the general public and are not mainstream.
Stage 2 is the ultimate goal of Rollup security, and currently, only a small number of Rollups have reached Stage 1, while most Rollups are in Stage 0. This shows that the development of the Rollup industry is a cause for concern for Vitalik.
In conclusion, Haotian believes that Vitalik’s article on the future scalability solutions for Ethereum has provided inspiration to the market. Especially expressing dissatisfaction with the current development status of Layer2 and giving optimistic affirmation to the performance of Blob, with the hope of positive developments for Rollups and Ethereum.
Now, the only uncertainty is left for Layer2 to decide how Ethereum should develop.
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