Proto-danksharding Based on Ethereum: Overview and Operating Mechanism

Proto-danksharding is an important upgrade to Ethereum, aimed at reducing the operational costs of rollups by introducing blob transactions. This upgrade is referred to as EIP-4844, also known as "native database." It will create a new data space for rollups, allowing them to publish data to Ethereum at a lower cost.

The main features of Proto-danksharding include:

• Introduce blob transactions, each block can contain up to 4 blobs, and each blob can store 128KB of data.
• Create a separate fee market for blobs, priced separately from regular transactions.
• Blob data is stored in the consensus layer for about 3 weeks, not permanently.
• Use KZG commitment scheme to verify blob data

The main goal of this upgrade is to reduce the operational costs of rollups, making Layer 2 solutions more attractive. However, it does not directly improve Ethereum's own transaction processing capacity.

Proto-danksharding is seen as the first step towards complete danksharding, which will further optimize Ethereum's capabilities as a data availability layer. Complete danksharding will introduce technologies such as data availability sampling and erasure coding, allowing each block to contain up to 64 blobs.

Although Proto-danksharding primarily benefits rollup operators, in the long run, it may indirectly benefit end users by reducing Layer 2 transaction costs. However, this effect may take some time to materialize, depending on the adoption of rollups and on-chain activity.

Overall, Proto-danksharding marks an important step for Ethereum towards a modular blockchain architecture, laying the foundation for future further scalability optimizations. However, it is not a comprehensive solution to Ethereum's scalability issues, but rather the first step towards that goal.