Danksharding

What Is Danksharding?

Danksharding is an advanced sharding architecture of the Ethereum Cancun upgrade. It is designed to enhance Ethereum's scalability by optimizing data management and transaction processing. Named after Ethereum researcher Dankrad Feist, Danksharding aims to address the limitations of traditional sharding methods by introducing a more streamlined and efficient approach. Unlike conventional sharding, where each shard has distinct blocks and block proposers, Danksharding employs a single block proposer system to simplify and improve transaction processing and data storage efficiency.

The primary goal of Danksharding is to increase Ethereum's capacity to handle higher transaction volumes while reducing costs and maintaining security. By enhancing the efficiency of blockchain rollups, Danksharding supports the network's ability to manage larger amounts of data per block, enabling more complex transactions without compromising speed or increasing gas fees. This innovation is crucial for Ethereum's long-term scalability and performance, allowing the network to process greater than 100,000 transactions per second.

How Does Danksharding Work?

Danksharding integrates a merged market fee approach and relies on a single block proposer to streamline the network's operations. This structure simplifies the sharding process by eliminating the need for multiple block proposers across different shards. Instead, block builders are responsible for selecting the data and transactions that go into each slot of a block. The single block proposer then chooses the highest bidder among the builders to oversee the block processing.

This method enhances the efficiency of Ethereum's data management and transaction processing, allowing for better handling of rollup transactions. Rollups batch and process transactions on their Layer 2 chain and transmit a "validity proof" to the Ethereum main chain. Danksharding enables the Ethereum network to process these bundled transactions without permanently storing all their data, reducing the mainnet's data burden over time. This approach helps lower transaction costs and improve network performance.

What is Proto-Danksharding?

Proto-Danksharding, also known as EIP-4844, is an intermediate step towards full Danksharding. It introduces new transaction types called "blob-carrying transactions" and a data type known as "blobs." These features are designed to enhance the Ethereum network's ability to handle data from blockchain rollups more effectively. Blobs provide a temporary storage solution for transaction data, which is cheaper and more efficient than the current persistent memory store, calldata.

Blobs have an expiration date of approximately 18 days, significantly reducing storage costs. Each blob can store up to 128 kilobytes of data, and each block can contain up to 16 blobs. This mechanism allows for more efficient processing of rollup transactions, as the Ethereum network is not burdened with storing all data permanently. Proto-Danksharding sets the groundwork for future Danksharding by introducing these innovations as part of the Ethereum Cancun upgrade.

Proto-Danksharding vs. Danksharding

Proto-Danksharding and Danksharding are both crucial components of Ethereum's scalability roadmap, but they serve different purposes and are implemented at different stages. Proto-Danksharding is an intermediate solution that provides the necessary infrastructure for the full implementation of Danksharding. It introduces blobs and blob-carrying transactions to improve data handling and reduce costs for rollups.

Danksharding, on the other hand, is the full realization of the scaling improvements that begin with Proto-Danksharding. While Proto-Danksharding allows for a limited number of blobs per block, Danksharding expands this capacity significantly, supporting a much larger number of blobs and enabling Ethereum to handle millions of transactions per second. Additionally, Danksharding includes further updates to the consensus client operations, such as proposer-builder separation and data availability sampling, to ensure the network can efficiently manage the increased data load without compromising decentralization or security

Learn more: All You Need To Know About Ethereum Dencun Upgrade - Simplified