Validator Responsibilities Under Full Danksharding

In Proto-Danksharding, validators download and attest to the full 128KB blob. At full scale with 64 blobs per block, this becomes an untenable ~8 MB/block data load, centralizing the network.

• Resource Burden: Requires >2 Gbps network & >2 TB SSD for honest nodes.
• Centralization Risk: Only large operators can participate, harming censorship resistance.

Full Danksharding's core innovation: validators no longer download blobs. They perform lightweight random sampling of a few hundred bytes to probabilistically verify data availability, enabled by KZG commitments and Erasure Coding.

• Constant Workload: Sampling cost is O(1), independent of total blob count.
• Decentralization Preserved: Enables participation on consumer hardware with ~100 Mbps internet.

Validators delegate block construction to specialized builders via PBS. Their role shifts to selecting the most valuable block via MEV-Boost-like auctions, securing the chain's economic security.

• Economic Security: Validators maximize rewards by choosing valid, profitable blocks.
• Censorship Resistance: Enshrined PBS proposals force inclusion lists, mitigating builder censorship.

Validators coordinate sampling via PeerDAS, a peer-to-peer subnetwork. They sample random cells from a 2D Reed-Solomon encoded data matrix, where any 75% recovery threshold guarantees data availability.

• Network Efficiency: Reduces redundant sampling through peer coordination.
• Robust Guarantee: 99.99%+ probability of detecting data withholding with minimal samples.

Validators execute the EIP-4844 blob gas market rules. They enforce the target and limit for blob gas per block, dynamically adjusting fees via a 1559-style mechanism to manage rollup demand and prevent spam.

• Fee Efficiency: Separates execution gas from blob gas, optimizing L2 economics.
• Demand Management: Algorithmic pricing prevents network congestion from cheap blob space.

If sampling fails to catch a malicious builder, the system falls back to fraud proofs (for execution) and optional Data Availability Committees. Validators act as judges, verifying these proofs to slash offenders, creating a crypto-economic safety net.

• Liveness over Safety: Prioritizes chain liveness; safety is secured by slashing.
• Defense in Depth: Combines cryptographic proofs (KZG) with economic incentives.

Validators must now attest to the availability of blobs, not just their validity. Withholding even a single 128KB blob for >1 DAS sampling window (~30 sec) can trigger slashing.

• New Penalty: Slashing for liveness failure, not just equivocation.
• Risk Vector: Malicious proposers can craft unreconstructable blobs to trap honest validators.
• Mitigation: Requires robust Data Availability Sampling (DAS) client implementations and peer-to-peer gossip network vigilance.

The core validator duty shifts from pure CPU/GPU work to managing massive, ephemeral data streams. This changes the economic and hardware attack surface.

• Bandwidth Spike: Must handle ~1.3 MB/s of persistent blob data ingress.
• Storage Churn: ~2.5 TB/year of blob data must be temporarily cached, not stored.
• Cost Shift: Operational overhead moves from energy to bandwidth & ephemeral SSD I/O, potentially centralizing infrastructure.

Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS) combined with blob markets creates a new MEV game: manipulating the timing and inclusion of data commitments to censor or front-run L2 sequencers.

• New Vector: Builders can withhold blobs to delay L2 state finality, extracting value from derivatives or oracle updates.
• Validator Complicity: Honest validators must reject blocks with missing blobs, but may be economically pressured by high builder bids.
• Ecosystem Risk: Attacks target Arbitrum, Optimism, zkSync finality, not just Ethereum mainnet transactions.

EIP-4844's blob gas market is independent and volatile. Validators must manage a new, unpredictable cost center or face missed attestations.

• Asymmetric Risk: Proposer gets full tip + blob fees; attesting validators bear resource cost with no direct fee reward.
• Fee Spikes: Sudden demand from Coinbase Base, Worldchain, or NFT mints can make attestation unprofitable for poorly configured nodes.
• Mitigation: Requires dynamic resource management and potentially new staking pool fee structures to cover variable bandwidth costs.

Validators no longer download full blocks. Your primary job is to sample and attest to the availability of ~128 KB data blobs from a ~1.3 MB block. This shifts the security model from compute to bandwidth and incentivizes honest data publishing.

• Key Benefit: Enables 16 MB/sec data throughput without requiring any single node to process it all.
• Key Benefit: Security scales with the number of samplers, not the size of the data.

Without enforced PBS, builders could create un-sampleable blocks, breaking the core security assumption of Danksharding. Your role splits: proposers choose headers, builders construct blocks, and you (the attester) validate data availability.

• Key Benefit: Prevents centralization pressure and MEV exploitation at the consensus layer.
• Key Benefit: Separates block building economics from block proposal trust.

Running a validator now requires a consensus client, an execution client, and a blob sidecar distribution network (like DAS). You must manage proofs for data availability (KZG commitments) and interact with a peer-to-peer blob propagation layer.

• Key Benefit: Enables rollups like Arbitrum, Optimism, zkSync to post data cheaply and securely.
• Key Benefit: Decouples settlement assurance from execution verification.

Danksharding's security relies on at least one honest actor sampling each blob. As a validator, you are that actor. Your sampling is probabilistic, requiring multiple rounds to achieve cryptographic certainty that data is available.

• Key Benefit: Reduces hardware requirements for individual nodes while maintaining collective security.
• Key Benefit: Makes data withholding attacks economically infeasible at scale.

You now manage two distinct fee markets: one for standard transactions in the execution payload and one for blobs in the data layer. Blob fees are dynamically adjusted via EIP-4844-style mechanisms, decongesting L1 for users while providing cheap DA for rollups.

• Key Benefit: Predictable, low-cost data availability for StarkNet, Base, Scroll.
• Key Benefit: Isolates L1 gas volatility from rollup transaction costs.

Your core duty shifts from verifying state transitions to attesting to data availability and block validity. Finality is achieved through a two-phase process: data availability attestation followed by consensus on the execution payload. This is a fundamental re-architecture of the validator's purpose.

• Key Benefit: Enables massive scalability by separating data and execution.
• Key Benefit: Aligns Ethereum's roadmap with a modular future championed by Celestia and EigenDA.