On the road to the Merge, teams of developers are coming up with innovative ways to remain relevant on the blockchain. Vitalik Buterin himself, the founder of Ethereum has introduced an Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) #4844. This EIP focuses on a somewhat simplistic way of sharding.
Let’s take a look at proto-danksharding.
What is DankSharding?
Sharding is the horizontal spread of processing power as opposed to adding it to one blockchain. Danksharding is a form of sharding for Ethereum blockchain that will simplify the handling of transaction data by network validators.
EIP 4844 is the proposal that introduced the concept of proto-danksharding. The EIP was drafted by Vitalik Buterin and Dankrad Feist, from whom the prefix ‘Dank’ is derived.
EIP4844 proposes having only one validator who chooses all transactions that enter a slot or group of data called a blob. What this will do is reduce gas fees on the Ethereum network, and more so for L2 rollups. With EIP4844 implementation, Arbitrum, Optimism and other L2 roll ups coils see upto 1000X reduced gas fees.
EIP4844 is meant to act as a provisional solution to rising gas fees before the main Ethereum 2.0 update kicks in fully AKA the Merge. The main technology in the Beacon chain is danksharding, and therefore, in a way, EIP4844 is a mini-danksharding.
Benefits of Proto-DankSharding
Instead of waiting for the Merge to begin experiencing low transaction fees, with EIP4844, it can start now. Proto-danksharding will take a considerably smaller amount of time to implement and deploy and can serve as interim before the ETH Merge.
EIP 4844 will also make L2 rollups immensely cheaper than they already are. On top of this blobs (the slots of data) are small in size (only 1MB) and only last about a month. This ensures that the network disk space use is manageable.
For those who thought the blockchain stores information forever, you might want to read this,
“The purpose of the Ethereum consensus protocol is not to guarantee storage of all historical data forever. Rather, the purpose is to provide a highly secure real-time bulletin board, and leave room for other decentralized protocols to do longer-term storage.”
Vitalik Buterin