Full Danksharding and Ethereum’s Throughput Ceiling

Rollups today post data to Ethereum as expensive calldata, creating a massive and volatile cost center. This fee directly limits transaction throughput and user adoption.

• Cost: Rollups spend $1M+ daily on L1 data fees.
• Inefficiency: ~80% of calldata bytes are overhead, not core transaction data.
• Bottleneck: This cost structure imposes a hard ~100 TPS practical ceiling for all rollups combined.

EIP-4844 introduces blob-carrying transactions, a dedicated and cheap data channel for rollups. Blobs are large, temporary data packets priced separately from gas.

• Capacity: Each blob provides ~0.125 MB of dedicated data space.
• Cost Reduction: Targets 10-100x cheaper data costs for rollups versus calldata.
• Separation: Decouples rollup data pricing from execution gas fees, enabling predictable scaling.

The endgame scales blob capacity to 64 per block, enabled by Data Availability Sampling (DAS). This turns Ethereum into a robust data availability layer for hundreds of rollups.

• Scale: Targets ~1.3 MB per slot, scaling to ~80 MB/s with 64 blobs.
• Security: DAS allows light nodes to cryptographically verify data availability without downloading everything.
• Throughput: Enables an aggregate rollup throughput of 100,000+ TPS, solving the data capacity crunch.

High-frequency blob posting creates new centralization pressures. The solution lies in PBS and a mature builder market to prevent sequencer-level censorship and MEV extraction.

• Risk: Without PBS, dominant rollup sequencers (e.g., Arbitrum, Optimism) become mandatory, trusted relayers for blob inclusion.
• Solution: Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS) allows specialized builders to compete on efficient blob bundling and inclusion.
• Outcome: Ensures credible neutrality and liveness for rollups, preventing a single point of failure.

Full Danksharding targets 128 data blobs per slot, a ~64x increase over proto-danksharding. However, global demand for cheap, secure block space is nearly infinite.\n- Competing Ecosystems: Solana, Monad, and high-throughput L2s like zkSync Hyperchains will continue to siphon demand, but also set a competitive ceiling on acceptable fees.\n- Exponential Demand: A single viral app (e.g., a fully on-chain game or social feed) could saturate blobs, recreating the fee market dynamics EIP-4844 aimed to solve.

Processing and propagating 1.3 MB of data every 12 seconds (128 blobs) demands a radical shift in validator infrastructure.\n- Minimum Specs Spike: Requirements will leap from consumer-grade hardware to professional, high-bandwidth setups, potentially centralizing consensus among large operators.\n- P2P Network Strain: The existing devp2p stack may buckle under the load, requiring a full transition to more complex networks like libp2p, a multi-year engineering challenge in itself.

Danksharding's success is predicated on a vibrant, decentralized L2 ecosystem. The current reality is trending opposite.\n- Sequencer Oligopoly: Major rollups like Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base run single, centralized sequencers. Full Danksharding makes them bigger, not more distributed.\n- Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS) for L2s: Without enforceable decentralized sequencing (e.g., based on EigenLayer restaking), the economic benefits of cheap blobs accrue to L2 treasuries, not end-users.

While Danksharding enables thousands of rollups, it does nothing to solve liquidity fragmentation. A chain of 10,000 sovereign L2s is a UX and capital efficiency nightmare.\n- Interop Lag: Bridges like LayerZero, Axelar, and Wormhole add latency and trust assumptions, breaking composability.\n- Intent-Based Band-Aids: Systems like UniswapX and CowSwap abstract fragmentation but rely on centralized solvers, trading decentralization for UX.

Ethereum security is a function of ETH staked vs. Value Secured. Danksharding's primary goal is to reduce L2 costs, which will drive massive value onto L2s.\n- Security Liability Grows: If L2 TVL grows 100x but ETH staked only grows 10x, the economic security ratio deteriorates.\n- Restaking Overload: Projects like EigenLayer attempt to re-hypothecate security, but create systemic risk and may not scale to secure all L2s and AVSs.

Full Danksharding is a 5+ year roadmap. The market may not wait.\n- Solana's Execution: Already delivers ~5k TPS with synchronous composability, a benchmark Ethereum's rollup-centric model cannot match directly.\n- Modular Alternative Maturity: By the time Danksharding ships, Celestia, EigenDA, and Avail may have cemented themselves as the standard data availability layers, making Ethereum's integrated DA a costly premium option.