Interpreting Vitalik's views on the opportunities and challenges he sees in Rollups

Vitalik posted on Twitter on the 28th, using technologies like Blob and PeerDAS as a starting point to discuss the future opportunities and concerns of Ethereum and Rollups. Cryptocurrency researcher Haotian analyzed the article here, looking forward to positive developments in Rollups.

This article is compiled and organized. For any doubts, please refer to the original text.

Background: Relationship between Blob and Rollups

Blob is a temporary data package that is directly callable by the consensus layer, decoupled from EVM calldata. The direct benefit is that EVM does not need to access Blob data when executing transactions, thus avoiding higher execution layer computation fees.

Currently, due to a balance of various factors, the size of a Blob is set at 128kb, and a batch of transactions sent to the mainnet can carry a maximum of two Blobs. The ideal design goal is for a block to eventually carry a data package of 16MB, approximately 128 Blobs.

For example, with Optimism, there are currently about 500,000 transactions per day, with an average of batching transactions to the mainnet every two minutes, carrying one Blob data package at a time. Of course, it is also possible to carry two Blobs at a time, but since the current TPS is not fully utilized, the capacity of each Blob will not be reached, only increasing additional storage costs.

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Haotian believes that after the Cancun upgrade, Ethereum's performance is sufficient, demonstrating this from various perspectives. On the other hand, Vitalik also expresses concerns about the future development of Rollups.

Opportunities for the Future Development of Rollups

Great Potential for Blob Usage Space

Due to the impact of Gas Limit and storage costs on the data capacity carried by Ethereum mainnet blocks, the ideal scenario is for one Slot block to carry a maximum of 128 Blobs. Currently, Optimism only uses one every two minutes, leaving ample room for Layer2 projects to increase TPS, expand the market, and enhance ecological prosperity.

Therefore, after the Cancun upgrade, there is no competition in terms of the number, frequency, and competitive use of Blob among Rollups for a period of time.

The reason Vitalik mentioned Blobscription is because projects of this kind that can temporarily increase transaction volume can increase Blob usage.

What opportunities and risks will Blob-based projects, BlobScriptions, bring?

As Rollup transaction volume increases, there are other potential solutions:

• Compressing the transaction volume of each batch to accommodate more transactions in the Blob space;
• Increasing the number of Blobs;
• Reducing the frequency of batch transactions;

Potential for Further Expansion: Blob+DAS

If one day the Layer2 market thrives to a certain extent, and the current 128 Blob data package per block is not enough, what can be done? The Ethereum development team has long provided a solution: utilizing the Data Availability Sampling (DAS) technique.

In simple terms, it involves distributing the data that originally needed to be stored by a single node across multiple nodes, such as each node storing 1/8 of the Blob data, forming a group of eight nodes to meet the original data availability capacity. This effectively increases the storage capacity of Blobs by 8 times, which is also what needs to be done in the future sharding phase.

Interestingly, Vitalik has reiterated this view several times, seemingly warning Layer2 projects not to always complain about the high cost of Ethereum data availability, as the current TPS has not fully utilized the capabilities of Blob data packages. Efforts should be made to rapidly develop the ecosystem, expand the user base, and not always focus on data availability fleeing.

Crisis in the Future Development of Rollups

Vitalik believes that among the mainstream rollup projects, only Arbitrum has reached Stage 1, and no mainstream projects have reached Stage 2. While projects like DeGate and Fuel have reached Stage 2, they are not yet familiar to the general public and are not mainstream.

Stage 2 is the ultimate goal of Rollup security. Currently, only a very few Rollups have reached Stage 1, with most Rollups still in Stage 0, indicating that the development of the Rollup industry truly worries Vitalik.

Looking Forward to the Growth of Rollups and Ethereum Together

In conclusion, Haotian believes that Vitalik's article on the future scalability solutions for Ethereum inspires the market. Especially expressing dissatisfaction with the current state of Layer2 development and giving an optimistic affirmation of Blob's performance, hoping that Rollups and Ethereum can have positive development.

The only uncertainty now lies with Layer2 to decide how Ethereum should develop, right?