Ethereum
What are Blobs? Improving Ethereum Scalability
Officially presented at the Ethereum network on March 13, 2024 in the Dencun Upgradeblobs are a new type of data storage space designed to create rollups cheaper and more efficient.
The consensus within the Ethereum community is that the best way to scale Ethereum is through rollups, also known as Layer 2 or L2, and that the best way to scale rollups is through the introduction of blobs.
Before blobs, if Ethereum experienced congestion, it would affect the transaction price across all of its Layer 2s equally. The introduction of blobs removes the correlation between Ethereum congestion and the cost of transactions across Layer 2s.
Blobs are a new data structure introduced to Ethereum in EIP-4844, more colloquially referred to as “Proto-danksharding“. EIP stands for Ethereum Improvement Proposal, the process by which Ethereum’s core developers suggest improvements to Ethereum.
Proto-danksharding is the precursor to full-danksharding and establishes its foundations by introducing blobs. It does this in the same format in which they will be used when implementing full-danksharding, in order to simplify the transition to full-danksharding.
Full-danksharding, or simply Danksharding, is an upcoming update to the Ethereum protocol. It represents what Ethereum’s core developers believe is the final step (for now) in making Ethereum a truly scalable blockchain, making transactions faster and cheaper.
Proto-danksharding is a step towards implementing Danksharding: it introduces Danksharding concepts, such as blobs, into Ethereum. Starting with proto-danksharding and introducing blobs, instead of diving straight into full danksharding, reduces the risk created by introducing drastic changes to a network too quickly.
Before blobs, when a layer 2 needed to verify its transactions, it would aggregate them and send them to layer 1 (Ethereum) for verification. The problem was that once the data was verified, it remained stuck on the Ethereum blockchain, taking up block space, forever.
This contributes to state congestion and makes Ethereum more congested, which in turn has also made Layer 2s more congested.
With blobs, when data is sent to Layer 1 for verification, it is sent in a blob, short for “Binary Large Object.” Each blob has 4,096 field elements and can hold up to 32 bytes of data per field element, which equates to approximately 75 MB per blob. You can think of it as a giant table of data, or… a big blob of data.
Blobs improve on the previous method of verifying data in that once data is verified from a blob, it can be deleted. This way, all transaction data from each rollup built on Ethereum does not need to permanently reside on the Ethereum blockchain, thus taking up valuable space.
Blobs also operate using a separate blob fee market, giving rise to “blob gas.” Blob gas is independent of gas on the Ethereum mainnet, meaning the only things that use blob gas are the blobs themselves.
Despite the funny names associated with Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade, it is a serious improvement. Blobs help make Ethereum less cluttered and they make rollups cheaper and faster to use.
Indeed, data checked in blobs can be deleted after use. Therefore, they do not cause state bloat on the Ethereum mainnet. “State bloat” refers to the fact that the more data Ethereum processes, the more data is kept permanently on its blockchain, and the more intensive the maintenance of the “state” of that network becomes.
Separating the blob gas market from the existing gas market is also a clear improvement. Since blobs have a separate gas market, congestion on Ethereum does not affect them. In the past, if there was a major event on Ethereum such as a highly anticipated event NFT According to Mint, the congestion caused by this event would propagate to layers 2 and make transactions more expensive. Separating blob gas markets from traditional Ethereum gas markets removes the correlation between Ethereum network congestion and the costs and speed of Layer 2 transactions.
Blobs also make Layer 2s much more cost-effective. Before blobs, when gas fees on them were correlated with Ethereum network congestion, the cost of running Layer 2s and Dapps built on them was much higher. The reduction in transaction fees allows builders and operators to run complex smart contracts or products at a fraction of the cost.
Let’s look at the on-chain data of rollup.wtfwe can see that the majority of layer 2s with the highest transactions per second are already using blobs.
In a TweeterJesse Pollak, founder of the Layer 2 Base network, revealed that after Dencun, the cost of a simple exchange transaction on Base increased from $0.31 to $0.0005.
However, it hasn’t all been rosy. Blobs have been slower than expected when it comes to publishing transactions to Layer 1. The creation of a new gas market for blobs has successfully decoupled Ethereum’s congestion from the transaction costs of accumulating them, but the gas market itself needs some polishing before it’s all it’s cracked up to be.
In an example in June 2024, blob transactions became more expensive than their predecessor – but this can be seen as a sign that blob adoption is still ongoing and, hopefully, as L2s become more efficient in using blobs, more and more blob builders Blocks will start accepting blocks that include blobs and as the capacity of blobs will increase – costs will go down.
Vitalik Buterin addressed these two questions in a March 2023 blog post published shortly after Dencun’s release. Buterin cites two key areas to focus on to continue evolving blobs: “Incrementally increasing blob capacity, eventually realizing the full vision of data availability sample with 16MB per data space slot” and “Improving L2s to better utilize the data space we have.”
So while the blobs have had some growing pains, they were mostly anticipated and solutions are underway.