Vitalik Buterin Shares the New Direction of Ethereum Sharding: What is EIP-4844

【TL; DR】

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1. EIP-4844 is expected to reduce the storage and memory performance requirements of the Ethereum network, and may reduce all Roll-up fees by ~100x compared to the current level.

2. Vitalik proposed to use the new Proto-danksharding to replace danksharding as a brand-new sharding design of Ethereum.

3. Blob carrying transactions is a new transaction form previously proposed by Vitalik, which can greatly reduce the consumption of data and Roll-up.

4. Under Danksharding's design, the sharding system is greatly simplified. Layer1 and roll-up can be synchronized directly. The data capacity provided by slicing for Roll-up processing will be larger, and the problem of delayed confirmation will be avoided.

5. EIP-4844 will have the following six advantages: conducive to Rollup, lower gas fee, forward compatibility, existing in beacon nodes, reducing the use of hard disk and shortening the existence time of Blob data.

On March 19, Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, shared his answers to frequently asked questions about EIP-4844 (Proto-danksharding) on Twitter. In the proposal, Vitalik proposed to use the new Proto-danksharding to replace danksharding as a new sharding design of Ethereum. The proposal is expected to reduce the performance requirements of Ethereum for storage and memory, and may reduce all Roll-up fees to 1% of the current level.

Image: [email protected]

Ethereum Upgrade: Beacon Chain + sharding + Layer 2

In this future system, the beacon chain is at the core. In addition to providing proof of stake (POS) for the whole Ethereum and forming a consensus layer, it also plays a role in synchronization with other fragment chain crosslinks. Like the heart, the beacon chains coordinate the whole network through a slot lasting 12 seconds and an epoch composed of 32 slots. In addition, the beacon chain also assigns a validator to the sharding chain by generating random numbers, which provides a unified security guarantee for each major sharding chain. For each slot, the beacon chain will randomly select a node from the validator to become a block proposer. For the sharding chain, each slot will also generate a block proposer. For each epoch, the beacon chain will also evenly distribute the validators to each slot, and then randomly select at least 128 nodes in each group from the validators of each slot to become the witness block of the Committees to judge the effectiveness of the beacon chain block and sharding block.


The current sharding technology is mainly data sharding. The Ethereum beacon chain is connected with 64 sharding chains, which also means that the processing capacity of the first generation is up to 64 times that of Ethereum. Each sharding chain is relatively independent. Ethereum addresses will be divided into multiple categories according to the first few letters. Each sharding handles transactions from the same type of address. Each node only needs to store a part of all transactions on the Ethereum network and validate only the part for which it is responsible.

If a node needs to use the data stored on other nodes, it can communicate and coordinate through the beacon chain. Since the sharding is to provide data capacity, the specific processing of transactions and the tasks that can only be run under contracts are mainly undertaken by the Layer-2 in the ecosystem, especially the Roll-up project.

EIP-4844 and DankSharding

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The main purpose of EIP-4844 is to solve the problem that Ethereum virtual machines (EVM) cannot execute the so-called "blob-carrying transaction", and use the new Proto-danksharding to replace danksharding. Therefore, EIP-4844 is also called Shard Blob Transactions.


Blob-carrying transaction is a new transaction form previously proposed by Vitalik, which can greatly reduce the consumption of Calldata and Roll-up. For blob-carrying transactions, an additional Blob data block will be attached, and the size of this data block can reach 125kB. However, the transactions carried by Blob cannot be accessed by the EVM executive layer before, but can only be viewed.

Danksharding is a scaling solution previously advocated by the Ethereum development group. It is named after Dankrad Feist, a member of the development group. It aims to complete the scalability under the conditions of decentralization and security. Vitalik also launched a Workshop on Danksharding on February 14 this year. As mentioned in our previous blog post "Endgame: Uncovering the Optimal Solution of Blockchain Scaling with Vitalik Buterin", Vitalik and others believe that in the future, if a single Rollup technology can occupy the whole market and all kinds of Rollups coexist, there are complex trading and arbitrage opportunities for multiple Rollups due to the existence of ross-domain miner extractable value opportunity (MEV), finally, a small number of people will seek MEV to control the production of the whole blockchain system.

Since centralized block output is unavoidable, the idea of breaking the situation can only be to separate the roles of block builders and proponents, that is, proposer builder separation (PBS). In order to obtain the maximum profit, the block builder sorts and constructs the block content according to gas fees from high to low in the trading pool, and then bids to the proposer (i.e. validator). The proposer can only choose the person with the highest bid to create the block. However, in the previous sharding design, each major sharding and beacon chain were validated independently, which became an obstacle to the implementation of PBS.

Based on this, Danksharding redesigned the problem of cross-domain MEV resistance to counter the centralization trend caused by MEV. In the new Danksharding sharding, the beacon chain will contain all blocks, and the data will be uniformly certified by the Committee. Under this new design, the sharding system is greatly simplified, layer 1 and roll-up can be synchronized directly, the data capacity provided by sharding for Roll-up processing will be larger, and the problem of delayed confirmation can be avoided. It is expected that by the end of this year, danksharding will be officially deployed to the Ethereum system after the upgrade of the hard fork. After the upgrade, Layer2 projects such as Arbitrum and Optimism are expected to benefit.

Conclusion

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According to the website eip4844.com, EIP-4844 will have the following six advantages: conducive to rollup, lower gas fee, forward compatibility, existing in beacon nodes, reducing the use of hard disk and shortening the existence time of Blob data. EIP-4844 may become another significant node in the development history of Ethereum.



Author: Gate.io Observer: Edward H. Translator: Joy Z.
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* This article represents only the views of the observers and does not constitute any investment suggestions.
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