Proto Danksharding Cost Curves After Mainnet

Pre-4844, L2s posted data to Ethereum calldata, where cost was a direct function of volatile base fees. A single NFT mint could spike costs for all rollups by 10-100x. This made L2 economics unpredictable and capped sustainable throughput.

EIP-4844 introduces blob-carrying transactions with a dedicated fee market. Blobs are large (~128KB), cheap, and auto-delete after ~18 days. This creates a predictable, low-cost data lane, decoupling L2 data availability from mainnet congestion.

• ~0.1¢ per blob: Target cost is 100x cheaper than calldata.
• Independent Pricing: Gas wars for execution don't affect blob fees.

Initial mainnet deployment is conservative at ~3 blobs/block. With each blob serving ~1 L2 block, this caps total L2 throughput. The real scaling comes with full danksharding, targeting 64+ blobs/block. Until then, blob fee markets will emerge during peak demand.

• ~40 TPS: Aggregate L2 capacity per slot.
• Peak Pricing: Expect blob fee spikes during airdrops or major NFT mints.

L2s with high transaction volumes and dedicated block space (e.g., Arbitrum, Optimism, zkSync Era) benefit most from marginal cost reductions. The new economics also make validiums and app-specific rollups (using Celestia, EigenDA) far more viable by slashing their largest operational cost.

• Validium Viability: DA cost drops from dominant expense to rounding error.
• Appchain Boom: Enables sustainable micro-economies.

With data costs dropping to near-zero, the sequencer revenue model shifts. Users pay L2 fees in ETH or native tokens, but the cost to settle is a fraction of a cent. The difference becomes sequencer profit, funding development and token incentives. This creates a massive, sustainable subsidy for ecosystem growth.

• High-Margin Business: Sequencer profit margins expand significantly.
• Funding Mechanism: Profits can be directed to grants and liquidity mining.

The final state is L2 transactions costing <$0.01 for both execution and settlement security. This achieves the original rollup promise: Ethereum as a secure settlement layer, with scalable execution migrated to L2s. It renders monolithic chains competing purely on throughput economically non-viable.

• Cent-Level Txs: Target cost for simple swaps and transfers.
• Security Premium: Users pay for Ethereum's security at commodity prices.

EIP-4844's separate gas market for blobs is designed for volatility. Without hedging, a sudden surge in L2 posting activity can cause 10-100x cost spikes, breaking fee predictability for end-users.

• Key Risk: Unpredictable L2 transaction fees during high-demand events.
• Key Imperative: Architectures must incorporate blob price oracles and dynamic batch scheduling.

Next-gen rollup sequencers, like those from Arbitrum and Optimism, must treat blob gas as a primary input. This means dynamic batching that delays non-urgent transactions and blob packing efficiency to maximize data per unit cost.

• Key Benefit: ~30-50% lower average data costs via intelligent scheduling.
• Key Benefit: Smoother, more predictable fee curves for end-users.

Blobs are pruned after ~18 days. This is a hard deadline for any protocol, like The Graph or Covalent, that relies on historical data availability for indexing or proofs. On-chain permanence is no longer guaranteed.

• Key Risk: Data loss and broken state proofs for applications needing old data.
• Key Imperative: Mandatory integration with long-term storage layers like Filecoin, Arweave, or EigenDA.

Architectures must bifurcate: Hot Data on blobs for immediate consensus, Cold Data to decentralized storage. This mirrors the Celestia and EigenLayer philosophy, creating a cost-optimized, multi-layer DA stack.

• Key Benefit: >90% cost reduction for historical data storage.
• Key Benefit: Enables verifiable computation on full history (e.g., RISC Zero proofs).

Most L2s currently rely on a single, trusted operator to post data to Ethereum. This creates a liveness fault and censorship risk. If the sequencer fails to post a batch, the chain halts.

• Key Risk: Single point of failure for chain liveness.
• Key Imperative: Decentralize the blob posting process with proof-of-custody or multi-sig relay networks.

Adopt a shared sequencer network like Astria or Espresso coupled with a sovereign DA layer like Celestia. This separates execution, sequencing, and data availability, eliminating the single-operator risk for blob posting.

• Key Benefit: Censorship-resistant and liveness-guaranteed L2 operation.
• Key Benefit: Enables atomic cross-rollup composability via shared sequencing.