Ethereum merge has come and gone; what is next for the future of scaling Ethereum? Danksharding and Proto-Danksharding are part of the future ways to scale Ethereum.
Sharding was proposed over five years ago to help the network scale by splitting activity across several chains. Like adding lanes to a highway, splitting the Ethereum network into “shards” was proposed to increase the amount of activity Ethereum could process, thereby decreasing fees and improving transaction speeds.
We give an easy-to-understand analysis of what danksharding and proto-danksharding are.
An Introduction to Danksharding
Danksharding is a sharding design that implements the concept of a merged market fee; unlike regular sharding, in which shards have both block and block proposers, only one proposer exists in danksharding. The block builders are responsible for choosing the data and transactions that go into each block slot.
Danksharding and sharding are interrelated, but they are different. While sharding is the overall design for splitting networks to scale Ethereum, danksharding is a step towards the actualization of this goal.
How Danksharding Operates
Block builders push a request to determine what goes into each slot that will later form a block, and then, it is left to the proposer to select the highest bidder. Once a builder has been chosen to oversee a slot, they have the onus of processing the entire block.
In some cases, oracles can carry out the role of a block builder. According to the Ethereum team, the main reason behind this design is to curb the two unfair controls that the miners currently have, Maximum Extractable Value or MEV.
First, miners can show unfair preference by choosing their transactions or the ones of those they know. Secondly, miners can hand-pick transactions with the highest bidder, leaving millions of other transactions in the mempool for hours or days.
With danksharding, however, people need to learn the contents of the ordered list of transactions that a builder submits.
What is the difference between block builders and proposers?
Block builders carry out the role of block construction, while block proposers select transaction headers that should be added to the block and broadcast them accordingly. These two work hand-in-hand.
Block builders bundle up transactions into slots or chunks to be added to a block, and then builders submit them to the proposers for selection. After the proposer selects a block, the block builders will process the block.
Proto-DankSharding
Proto-Danksharding (EIP-4844) is astep to Danksharding. It sets up blob transactions, carrying data used by rollups. As such, it can make block space cheaper for rollups and move Ethereum closer to Danksharding.
These blob transactions add the ‘data availability layer’ functionality to Ethereum. This means that the current computational resources will be sufficient to manage this change (i.e., no need to rely on builders with advanced hardware).
To get to Danksharding from Proto-Danksharding, a few more changes are required. Due to the jump in block space from a target of 1 to 16 MB, data availability sampling (DAS) is required to allow validators to easily verify availability without downloading the entire data blob.
Additionally, the likely specialization of builders due to PBS will mean they have the computational resources to handle the increased load of building 16MB blocks.
Final Thoughts
The Ethereum network has been battling the problems of relatively slow throughput and high gas fees for years, and Ethereum researchers have proposed various technical solutions, including sharding.
Therefore, proto-danksharding is a route to implementing the complete sharding roadmap, and its main aim is to reduce transaction costs for layer-2 protocols through a blob-centric transaction format.
The Ethereum community has been keen on enhancing their modularity goal by providing Layer 2 blockchains with the needed architecture to build more scalably on the Ethereum protocol.
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