What opportunities and risks will BlobScriptions, based on blobs, bring?

This week, the Ethereum NFT project Ethscriptions launched a new type of content stored in blobs — BlobScriptions. Due to its low cost, a large number of content were minted in the market yesterday, causing a temporary increase in rollups' gas fees and drawing attention from developers. However, it also sparked imagination in the market for applications of blobs.

Ethereum blobs Manuscripts

blobs: Expiring Data Storage Space

Following the Dencun upgrade in Cancun, EIP-4844 introduces a new data availability (DA) storage space for the Ethereum network - blobs, allowing rollups projects to store data availability of transaction information here. Due to data expiration and deletion after two weeks, it significantly reduces the gas fees for existing rollups transactions, by approximately 10 to 100 times.

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However, like IPFS, blobs are a fully decentralized storage system, so it is not limited to just Rollups projects.

BlobScriptions: Manuscripts Created based on blobs

The Ethereum Manuscripts project Ethscriptions recently introduced ESIP-8, creating a method to mint manuscripts on blobs as outlined in EIP-4844, calling these manuscripts BlobScriptions. Ethscriptions introduces the sidecar field attachment format, which will be dispersed and stored in one or more blobs.

One of the co-founders of the project, Middlemarch, also shared tools for minting and browsing on Twitter, and has made the indexer open-source for all users to participate.

Since data within blobs expires and gets deleted, it is expected that the indexer supported by the Ethscriptions team will assist in storing this data. For more detailed information, you can refer to the Ethscriptions official documentation.

Significant Disruption to the Existing blobs Market

There has been a surge in manuscript projects driven by speculative intentions within the community. According to data from Dune Analytics, just yesterday 27, 4,638 blob spaces were used, accounting for approximately 32% of all usage, indicating the speed at which the market is chasing manuscript hotspots.

A researcher on social media pointed out that in recent days, there has been an increase in missed certification errors among Ethereum network validators, possibly related to the rapid increase in blob usage. However, the correlation has not been confirmed yet.

New Opportunities and Challenges for blobs

Opportunities: blobs will be a brand new application field

As manuscripts only require decentralized storage space to be implemented, being the first application case on blobs besides rollups opens up more imaginative space in the market regarding blobs, such as decentralized exchanges stored in blobs, although feasibility remains another matter.

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Expect to see more applications related to blobs in the future.

Challenges: Ensuring rollups development is not affected

The significance of blobs for the Ethereum network, a crucial part is to enhance the scalability of Layer2, allowing the Ethereum ecosystem to achieve the vision of 100,000 TPS. Therefore, the stability of blobs operation is considered one of the lifelines for the future development of the Ethereum network.

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With the recent manuscript frenzy phenomenon, developers are also reflecting on how to ensure that blobs maximize the potential of rollups. There are still many questions that need to be carefully considered, whether to increase the storage space of blobs or limit other projects' use of blobs.