Who touches the cheese of Ethereum? The opportunities behind this main narrative in 2024

Source: Vernacular Blockchain

"Legitimacy", a word that literally contradicts the spirit of Web3, has recently begun to appear more and more frequently in everyone's field of vision. middle.

In particular, the crypto community has started a big discussion about the legitimacy of Ethereum DA, which involves many current star projects such as EigenLayer and Celestia. Even Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has begun to speak out frequently. So what exactly is DA, and what does the debate surrounding its “orthodoxy” mean?

01 What is DA?

DA, which stands for data availability, is an important part of today’s modular blockchain architecture.

Different from a single blockchain, a modular blockchain splits different parts of a blockchain network into corresponding functional layers, such as execution, data availability ( data availability), consensus, and settlement:

Comparison of single chain and modular blockchain, Tuyuan Network

Execution: Responsible for processing Execution layer for transactions and status updates;

Data availability (DA layer):Responsible for storing the data required to verify the validity of transactions;

Consensus :Responsible for determining the ordering and final confirmation of transactions within the block, that is, determining the order in which transactions in the memory pool are included in which block;

Settlement:Responsible for verifying Rollup L2 status data and processing fraud proof/validity proof;

Currently with the heating up of the L2 war and the continuous development of modular narrative, Rollup focusing on execution or Celestia focusing on data availability There are endless projects.

In a modular world, the core function of data availability (DA) is to ensure that on-chain data is available and accessible to all network participants to reduce costs and expand the blockchain.

What are the benefits of this?

First of all, it is naturally more specialized. Take the separation of data availability and execution as an example. In a modular architecture, a group of nodes can be completely responsible for DA. Another group (or groups) of nodes are responsible for execution, and everyone performs their duties. In this context, a dedicated DA layer can improve interoperability and reduce costs, in addition to achieving higher throughput.

Because in theory, every node in the blockchain network must download all transaction data to verify whether the data is available, which is an extremely inefficient and costly task, but it is also the most The way blockchain currently works, there is also a barrier to scalability, as the amount of data required for verification increases linearly with block size.

Secondly, it greatly improves scalability,making each blockchain a Lego brick. Developers can build more complex blockchains by combining specialized modular chains. Scalable blockchain makes deploying new L2s increasingly easier through rollup-as-a-service providers such as Caldera, AltLayer and Conduit.

So to put it bluntly, taking the modularization of Ethereum as an example, it uses the L1 main chain as the settlement and data availability layer, and uses various Rollup and other L2 solutions as the execution layer to achieve expansion.

This is also Ethereum’s roadmap towards a modular blockchain stack. Once this transition is complete, users will be able to use L2 solutions while still benefiting from the security of Ethereum’s base layer sex.

02 DA "legitimacy" debate

Then why has Vitalik and the community recently Will there be a big discussion about DA? What's the reason for everyone's controversy?

It’s very simple. Currently, in addition to Ethereum (that is, directly submitting state data and proofs to Ethereum L1), there are also mainstream projects in the data availability layer. New solutions such as Celesita, EigenLayer and Avail.

With the development of Celestia, with its scalability, sovereignty, flexibility, shared security and other features, it competes with Ethereum in terms of data availability layer and attracts some Universal Rollup L2 such as Manta, ZkFair, etc. switch to Celestia.

The most direct impact is the "broken window effect" of Manta Pacific migrating the data availability layer from Ethereum to Celestia. This is also the first L2 based on Celestia, which has triggered extensive discussion and attention in the Ethereum community.

For Manta Pacific, the motivation for doing this is undoubtedly to reduce Data availability cost - According to official disclosures, since the DA layer was migrated to Celestia, the cost has been reduced by 99.81% compared to using the Ethereum main network, which is an exponential decrease.

Of course, compared to Rollup, which uses Ethereum as the DA layer, third-party DA solutions like Celestia must sacrifice a certain amount of security, but for these L2 trade-offs , which DA to choose is related to cost and safety, but the impact of cost is undoubtedly more critical.

Therefore, new projects such as Aleo, Dymension, and ZKFair have successively invested in new DA solutions such as Celestia to reduce costs. Even Polygon has chosen to switch to NEAR, saying bluntly that "it is 8,000 cheaper than Ethereum." times".

Translation: 8000 times cheaper than Ethereum!
I wonder how this compares to other DA solutions like Celestia?

It is foreseeable that as long as the cost advantage persists, there will be more and more L2 solutions integrating new DA solutions such as Celestia in the future, which will have a big impact on Ethereum, especially This sparked a fight between the Ethereum community and the Celesita team for the right to define Ethereum L2.

So, the big debate on DA "legitimacy" is, in short, the debate on the universal Rollup L2 to change the DA layer from Ethereum to modular blockchain DA such as Celesita and Avail. .

03 Hidden lines behind the development of the DA track

In general, Celestia and other related DA The proliferation of solutions has indeed weakened the competitiveness of Ethereum DA to a certain extent.

Specifically, Celestia is not the only one that has impacted the "legitimacy" of Ethereum. If we classify the current DA track from a macro perspective (excluding centralized solutions),it can be roughly divided into There are four categories:

Ethereum blob / Danksharding;

Independent decentralized DA such as Celestia;

EigenDA/MantleDA (DA using ETH restaking);

Newcomers such as NEAR;

Needless to say, Celestia is regarded by many community users as a "rigid necessity" that brings huge economic benefits to L2 Gas costs.

Especially at present, Ethereum projects such as Manta, ZKFair, Arbitrum Orbit, general L2 Eclipse, decentralized API data service protocol Pocket Network, and modular blockchain network Movement Labs have already launched Use Celestia.

Once the scale effect is formed, it may indeed continue to erode Ethereum’s fee income, grow into a specialized DA giant, and obtain extremely high valuation premiums (share of Ethereum’s loss).

In addition, EigenDA makes full use of the existing infrastructure of Ethereum, relies on Ethereum, and extends the security consensus of Ethereum through Restaking. Therefore, it is essentially maintaining Ethereum. The "legitimacy" of Ethereum's DA is enhanced by Ethereum's DA capabilities.

NEAR is also a "new" seed player entering the game. In addition to the Polygon mentioned above, Arbitrum Orbit has also integrated Near DA, allowing developers to launch their own scalable products based on Arbitrum's technology. Configure Rollup.

Generally speaking, in fact, from the soaring market price of TIA, we can also see that the DA track has gradually entered everyone's mainstream vision with the evolution of the new pattern of L1&2.

From this perspective, the game about DA's "legitimacy" will also become a main narrative in 2024, and even evolve a new "Ethereum killer". As for what kind of new "Ethereum killer" can emerge? Project, let’s wait and see.