Ethereum Co-Founder Vitalik Buterin Reveals What Comes Next After Blob Activation

With Dencun Upgrade and blob activation out of the way, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has hinted that the next thing to do is verify the blobs with a conservative version of DAS known as PeerDAS.

Blob Verification: The Successor to Ethereum Dencun Upgrade

It’s been over two weeks since the Ethereum Dencun upgrade went live on mainnet at the epoch 269568 with the first blob recorded a few minutes later. The upgrade brought the deployment of EIP-4844, also known as “proto-danksharding”, which significantly lowers Layer-2 gas fee or transaction costs. With this, developers and community members have been eager to find out the next thing after the blob activation. 

Buterin highlighted that the blob fee market has reached “price discovery mode.” He further explained that the future of Ethereum scaling depends on rollups backed by data space secured with data availability sampling. Consequently, deploying EIP-4844 is crucial to reaching this future.

This next step of verifying blobs with PeerDAS is necessary for introducing additional scaling solutions to the protocol. In a published statement, the Ethereum co-founder noted that “blobs are the moment where Ethereum scaling ceased to be a “zero-to-one” problem, and became a “one-to-N” problem.”

The next step is verifying blobs with PeerDAS, a conservative version of DAS that can offer some additional scaling. At first, we'll likely see some clients full-verifying and others doing DAS checks.

More and more advanced versions of DAS can be introduced over time. pic.twitter.com/w0R30zBmjP

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) March 28, 2024

Ethereum Developers Targeting Data Expansion

For the Ethereum developer team, the aim of all these upgrades is data availability sampling. Notably, the EIP-4844 does not directly give data availability sampling but it sets up the infrastructure that makes it easier to implement. With EIP-4844, data availability sampling can be introduced and blob count can be increased behind the scenes. All these can be achieved without any involvement from users or applications.

In addition to verifying these blobs, there would be a progressive increment of blob capacity as this would contribute to bringing to life the full vision of data availability sampling with 16 MB per slot of data space, marked as the eventual goal. The Ethereum Dencun upgrade team will also work on improving L2s to maximize the blob data space made available to them in the meantime.

Meanwhile, several Ethereum-based L2 platforms have seen a major drop in gas fees since the Dencun upgrade and the integration of EIP-4844. The Dencun upgrade even impacted the cost associated with zkSync Era’s sequencer usage, particularly in using Calldata.