What Happens When Data Disappears

Blobs are deleted after ~18 days, breaking any protocol that assumed permanent, cheap on-chain data. This is a direct attack on rollup security models and historical data access.\n- Security Risk: Fraud proofs and validity proofs require old state data to be available.\n- Data Gaps: Indexers, explorers, and analytics become unreliable without persistent data.

Specialized DA layers are competing to be the permanent, cost-effective data backbone, decoupling security from execution. This creates a modular stack and fee market competition.\n- Cost Arbitrage: Rollups can choose DA based on price and security, creating a multi-billion dollar TAM.\n- Throughput Race: Layers like EigenDA leverage restaking, while Celestia and Avail build dedicated validator sets.

The ecosystem response is a new layer of cryptographically assured data storage. Projects like EigenLayer's Data Availability (DA) services and Avail's Nexus ensure data persistence and verifiability long after blobs expire.\n- Proof-of-Custody: Light clients can verify data is stored without downloading it.\n- Universal Settlement: Becomes the single source of truth for cross-rollup state resolution.

Application chains and rollups are no longer monolithic L1 tenants; they are sovereign DA consumers. This shifts the core value accrual from execution to data publishing and verification.\n- Sovereignty: Rollups control their security budget and data trade-offs.\n- Composability Risk: New security assumptions emerge between separate DA, execution, and settlement layers.

Decentralized sequencer projects like Astria and Espresso must now guarantee not just transaction ordering, but also data publication to a chosen DA layer. This bundles sequencing fees with DA costs.\n- Revenue Stack: Sequencers capture value from both execution ordering and data bandwidth.\n- Fast Finality: DA guarantees enable faster bridge attestations compared to Ethereum L1 finality.

As DA becomes a critical, billable public good for the entire modular ecosystem, it faces regulatory scrutiny and geopolitical fragmentation. The entity controlling the dominant DA layer holds immense power.\n- Censorship Resistance: Becomes a function of DA layer decentralization and governance.\n- Commoditization: Long-term, DA may become a low-margin utility, with value accruing to the settlement and execution layers on top.

A sequencer or validator cartel can withhold transaction data, halting state progression and freezing funds. This is a liveness failure distinct from consensus attacks.

• State Freeze: Users cannot prove ownership or exit to L1.
• Forced Inactivity: The chain appears to function but is economically dead.
• No Fraud Proofs: Without data, Arbitrum and Optimism fraud proofs are impossible, making rollups insecure.

Exponential L2 growth strains underlying DA layers, creating a scalability ceiling and fee volatility.

• Ethereum Calldata: Becomes prohibitively expensive at scale, forcing compromises.
• Celestia / EigenDA Saturation: Modular DA layers face the same scaling trilemma; TPS is not infinite.
• Fee Spikes: Congestion on the DA layer translates directly to L2 fee explosions, breaking the "cheap blockspace" promise.

Splitting execution, settlement, and DA across disparate layers creates systemic risk and complex failure dependencies.

• Weakest Link Security: The chain's security is that of its least secure component (e.g., a nascent DA layer).
• Synchronization Failures: Cross-layer communication (like proofs) can break, causing chain splits.
• Liquidity Fragmentation: Bridges and DeFi protocols (Uniswap, Aave) struggle to secure cross-DA-layer assets.

The economic pressure to minimize DA costs incentivizes reliance on centralized, permissioned data providers.

• Trusted Committees: Solutions like EigenDA and near-DA networks rely on small validator sets for cost efficiency.
• Regulatory Attack Surface: A few corporate entities controlling data creates a clear target for enforcement.
• Contradicts Ethos: Replaces decentralized security with a faster, cheaper, but more fragile and censorable system.