Interpreting Vitalik’s Insights on the Opportunities and Challenges Witnessed in Rollups
Vitalik tweeted on the 28th, using Blob, PeerDAS, and other technologies as starting points to discuss the future development opportunities and concerns of Ethereum and Rollups. Cryptocurrency researcher Haotian analyzed the article and summarized that he looks forward to the positive development of Rollups. This article is organized by ChainNews. If there are any doubts, please refer to the original text.
Background: Relationship between Blob and Rollups
Opportunities for future development of Rollups
Blob has great potential for use of space
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, thus avoiding higher execution layer computing costs.
Currently, due to a balance of 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 data packets of 16MB, approximately 128 Blobs.
Therefore, the Rollup project team aims to balance factors such as the number of Blob blocks, TPS transaction capacity, and Blob mainnet node storage costs, and use Blob space with the best cost-effectiveness.
Taking Optimism as an example, there are approximately 500,000 transactions per day, with an average of one batch sent to the mainnet every two minutes, carrying one Blob data packet at a time. Of course, two Blobs can also be carried at once, but because the current TPS does not require it, the capacity of each Blob is not fully utilized, only increasing additional storage costs.
Haotian believes that after the Dencun upgrade, Ethereum’s performance is already sufficient, which is proven from various perspectives. On the other hand, Vitalik also expressed concerns about the future development of Rollups.
Due to the influence of Gas Limit and storage costs on the amount of data carried by Ethereum’s 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 a lot of room for Layer2 projects to increase TPS, expand the market, and promote ecological prosperity.
Therefore, after the Dencun upgrade for a period of time, there is no competition in terms of the quantity, frequency, and pricing of Blob usage by Rollups.
The reason why Vitalik mentioned Blobscription is because projects like this can temporarily increase transaction volume and increase Blob usage.
When the transaction volume of Rollup increases, there are currently other potential solutions:
– Compress the transaction volume of each batch to accommodate more transactions in Blob space.
– Increase the number of Blobs.
– Reduce the frequency of batch transactions.
If one day the Layer2 market flourishes to a certain extent and the current Blob data packets are 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.
Simply put, it distributes the data that originally needed to be stored by one node among 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. This is equivalent to expanding the Blob storage capacity by 8 times, which is also what needs to be done in the future sharding phase.
Interestingly, Vitalik has repeatedly emphasized this viewpoint, seemingly warning Layer2 project parties not to constantly complain about the high cost of Ethereum’s data availability, as the current TPS has not fully developed the capability of Blob data packets. They should quickly increase their efforts to develop the ecosystem and expand the user base, instead of always thinking about DA escape.
Vitalik believes that currently only Arbitrum has achieved Stage 1 among mainstream rollup projects, and no mainstream project has reached Stage 2. Haotian cited examples such as DeGate and Fuel, which have reached Stage 2, but these projects are still not well-known and are not mainstream.
Stage 2 is the ultimate goal of Rollup security, and currently only a few Rollups have reached Stage 1, while most Rollups are still in Stage 0. This shows that the development of the Rollup industry is indeed a cause for Vitalik’s concern.
In summary, Haotian believes that Vitalik’s article on the future scalability solutions of Ethereum has provided inspiration to the market. In particular, it expresses dissatisfaction with the current development status of Layer2 and gives optimistic affirmation to the performance of Blob. He hopes that Rollups and Ethereum can have positive development.
Now the only uncertainty is left for Layer2 to decide, how should Ethereum develop?
