The Guide to Danksharding
The dankest upgrade coming to Ethereum.
*This post was sent as an email on December 9th, triggering the deactivation of my previous email outreach services.
Today’s write-up explains one of the most exciting upgrades coming to Ethereum - Danksharding.
Scaling Ethereum (ensuring it’s fast and cheap to use) has historically been a lesser priority to the network than decentralization and security. With decent progress having been made on the first two priorities, Ethereum’s attention is now turning towards scaling. First stop: Danksharding.
It’s coming sooner than you think. Let's dive in.
Splitting into Shards
Our story starts with Sharding, a concept that was envisioned before Ethereum launched as a way to scale the network. It proposed splitting the blockchain into many streams processing transactions in parallel. It sounds complicated, and technically, it is.
Layer 2s to the Rescue
Over time, different approaches to scaling Ethereum have been built by many different groups. These are called Layer 2’s (L2s) because they’re built on top of Ethereum, the first layer. L2s execute transactions and submit reports to the Ethereum blockchain. Different types of L2s exist, but the most secure kind are known as Rollups.
Rollups as Shards
To avoid the difficulty of splitting the blockchain into parallel streams, Danksharding proposes using Rollups as the parallel streams instead. The benefits are lower gas costs for everyone, significantly more network capacity, and more fairness in transaction processing. Let’s explain each.
1. Cheaper Fees for All
To make gas costs cheaper, Danksharding proposes separating the transactions users perform from the reports Rollups must submit. Today they’re all technically the same, and separating them allows users to perform transactions without competing for the same space as Rollups. Everyone pays less gas.
2. Significant Bandwidth
By streamlining how Rollups report to Ethereum, Rollups add significantly to the number of transactions that can be performed per second. Vitalik Buterin has estimated a potential 6400x increase in capacity. All without making any compromises on decentralization or security.
3. Removing Censorship
Finally, Danksharding proposes separating the validator role into two. The reason is to remove a validator’s ability to choose which transactions to include in a block and which to leave out. Instead, builders will assemble blocks, and proposers will select from amongst those blocks and add them to the blockchain.
The Future is on Rollups
Danksharding leverages the ecosystem that has been built around Ethereum to achieve it’s original vision. Rollups are a separate innovation that have been built to make progress on Ethereum’s scaling limitations. This is why Danksharding has lead to a shift in thinking, with Ethereum now having a “Rollup-centric Roadmap.”
Ethereum Secures it All
As Ethereum becomes the hub connecting Rollups together, Ethereum’s responsibility becomes ensuring that the Rollups maintain all the data they’re supposed to. This is done through Data Availability Sampling, a method that verifies the presence of the data without reviewing every piece of it.
Let's Get Danksharding
Set to go live in stages, the first step towards Danksharding is with an upcoming upgrade to Ethereum named Proto-Danksharding. This upgrade creates a new type of transaction (called a Blob) specifically for Rollups to submit their reports, separating them from users. This allows Rollups to operate without affecting gas fees for users.
Wen Scaling
Proto-Danksharding is the first step towards Danksharding, and could be delivered as soon as March of 2023. Despite focusing mainly on separating Rollups from user transactions, the upgrade does deliver some of the scaling benefits and makes development towards full Danksharding easier.
Rollups Win Most
Although Proto-Danksharding will make gas fees cheaper on Ethereum, fees will become substantially cheaper on Rollups with estimates aligning on 100-100x potential gas savings. This would bring down transaction fees to a fraction of a cent; the infrastructure this could facilitate would be game-changing.
Thank You & Additional Reading!
Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed this primer on Danksharding, as well as it's first form of Proto-Danksharding that we can expect soon.
Here are some more resources if you'd like to dive deeper!
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Catch you next Friday!
Stay kind. Stay curious.
Really well written, compelling and easy to read