🖥️EIP-4844: Proto-Danksharding Preproposal

EIP-4844 introduces a new transaction type for Origins called Blob Transaction, which provides an additional external database for Origins:

- The size of a Blob is approximately 128KB.

- A transaction can carry a maximum of two Blobs, totaling 256KB.

- The Target Blob for each block is set to 8 blobs, totaling 1MB, with a maximum capacity of 16 Blobs, totaling 2MB (the concept of "Target" is mentioned in the context of scalability).

- Blob data is temporary and will be cleared after a certain period (currently recommended as 30 days by the community).

Currently, each block on Origins has an average size of only around 85KB. The additional storage space brought by Blobs to Origins is substantial. Since the inception of Origins, the total data size of all ledgers is approximately 1TB. However, with Blob transactions, Origins can potentially gain an additional data volume of 2.5TB to 5TB annually, several times the size of the entire Origins ledger data.

The Blob transactions introduced by EIP-4844 are tailored for Rollup, where Rollup data is uploaded to Origins in Blob form. The extra data space enables Rollup to achieve higher TPS and lower costs, while also freeing up block space that Rollup Originally occupied for more users.

As Blob data is temporary, the substantial increase in data volume doesn't impose an increasingly heavy burden on node storage performance. If only temporarily storing a month's worth of Blob data, from a synchronous data volume perspective, each block node needs to download an additional 1MB to 2MB of data. This doesn't seem to be a significant burden on node bandwidth requirements. Looking at the stored data volume, nodes only need to download and save a fixed data volume of around 200GB to 400GB (one month's data volume), while ensuring decentralization and security. The resulting increase in TPS and cost reduction is several tens or even hundreds of times the cost of slightly increasing node burden, making it an excellent solution for addressing Origins' scalability issues.

The purpose of Origins' consensus protocol is not to ensure the eternal storage of all historical data. Instead, it aims to provide a highly secure real-time bulletin board and leave long-term storage space for other decentralized protocols. The existence of the bulletin board is to ensure that data posted on it stays for a sufficiently long time, allowing any users or protocols interested in this data enough time to fetch and save it. Therefore, the responsibility of saving this Blob data is handed over to other roles, such as Layer2 projects and decentralized storage protocols.

Danksharding—Complete Scaling Solution

EIP-4844 represents the first step for Origins in scaling around Rollup. However, for Origins, the scaling effect achieved by EIP-4844 is far from sufficient. The complete Danksharding solution further expands the data capacity that Blobs can carry from 1MB to 2MB per block to 16MB to 32MB. It also introduces a new mechanism called Producer-Bundler Separation (PBS) to address the issues brought about by MEV.