Ethereum’s Dencun Upgrade

Last week, Ethereum’s long-awaited Dencun upgrade finally went live on Mainnet.

Most notably, the upgrade introduced ephemeral data blobs with EIP-4844, AKA Proto-Danksharding, which reduced rollup transaction fees by 10-100x.

Here’s everything you need to know and what’s next.

Background

Scaling Ethereum has been a hotly discussed topic, and the implementation of rollups brought significant advancements.

Rollups, or L2s, execute transactions offchain, batch the results, and post them in a compressed form to Ethereum’s L1.

This = cheaper and faster transactions.

Problem With Rollups

Optimistic and ZK rollups have been getting tons of traction.

However, it’s expensive and computationally intensive to post their data to Ethereum’s L1.

This is because their data were being permanently stored onchain even tho they were only needed long enough to be verified.

EIP-4844

EIP-4844 introduces blobs, which are used as temporary data storage on Ethereum’s L1.

Instead of storing all of a rollup’s transaction data onchain, blobs are a way to preserve the important data in batches and discard the rest.

Meaning reduced costs and increased capacity.

Blobs

Blobs create a new blobspace attached to Ethereum blocks, specifically tailored for rollups.

Blocks can include up to six blobs, and each blob is available for 18 days before it expires.

Blobs are way cheaper than calldata, but their fees still vary based on supply and demand.

Ethereum as a Modular Blockchain

EIP-4844 makes Ethereum a more efficient data availability layer for rollups.

Ethereum now processes both regular transactions that consume blockspace and blob-carrying transactions that consume blobspace.

By doing so, rollups are less affected by L1 activity, e.g. an NFT mint.

Benefits

EIP-4844 has already led to savings on Arbitrum, zkSync, and Starknet of ~93% and Optimism, Base, Zora, and Mode of ~99%.

This has brought users’ transaction fees down 10-100x to a fraction of a cent.

Getting us closer to a reality of seamless user experiences.

What’s Next

However, transaction fees may not stay this low forever.

Many rollups like Polygon zkEVM, Linea, and Scroll have still yet to manually integrate EIP-4844.

As more rollups implement blobs, we’ll see more competition to use blobspace and a new transaction fee equilibrium.

Summary

To summarize, EIP-4844 and blobs introduce:

- More efficient data availability

- A cheaper way for L2s to post data on L1

- Lower transaction fees on L2s for end users

- Fee market for blobs unaffected by L1 activity

- Foundation for the full sharding upgrade in the future

A New Era for Ethereum Scalability

The Dencun upgrade has paved the way for more users to come onchain and new use cases like L3s.

Overall, this is a huge win for Ethereum and its rollup-centric future.

Learn more about EIP-4844: eip4844.com

Support Ethereum core devs: fundcoredevs.xyz

It’s time to usher in the next wave of onchain innovation!!