The Path of Data Availability
What does data availability mean?
The correct definition of Data availability is that all transaction-related data can be reached to nodes on the blockchain network. It allows nodes to download, verify transactions and compute the blockchain’s state trustlessly.
Blockchain is a consensus machine.
For those monolithic blockchains, every transaction needs to be confirmed by every validating nodes(aka full nodes) . But it’s too expensive for a simple transaction of exchangingd $10 or even $1.
The challenge comes from blockchains throughput and on-chain storage cost. we can see that Bitcoin’s processing speed is around 5–7 transactions per second, and the popular Ethereum can only process 15–20 transations per second — — that’s not enough for the need of users, expecially on the bull market. Besides, the high need of on-chain data storage upgrades hardware requirements for full nodes, which will increase the threshold of new miner.
There are some new options we can choose: rebuild a new data abailability layer that can offer these original data for some transaction. And here is a problem that we need to solve: How to confirm all of the data behind each block can be trusted?
To answer this question, we need to know the solutions those are solving this problem:
- On-chain solution
It means data is stored on-chain by the nodes who can execute transactions.
- Off-chain solution
It means the transaction data is stored outside the original blockchain network.
That’s why Layer2s can get the space of developing and extending. The essence of Layer2 is that the process of execution is off-chain(Etheruen mainnet) and the result of execution is on-chain.
Rollups, optimistic rollups and zero-knowledge rollups, is an important direction for Ethereum, They publish transaction data on Ethereum as Calldata, which allows anyone to execute transactions and validate the rollup chain.
Uses can benift from these Layer2 solutions:
- Cheeper cost fee
- More complicated DApps and application innovations
Take Arbitrum as an example, you can see the information above, the cost that user paid for a transaction is devided into two parts: L1 gas and L2 gas used, and the former is more expensive than the later. For those derivative protocol and blockchain games, Layer2 can offer a more friendly deploying environment and ecosystem.
Different solutions have different improvement of data compression. we can reach more info about Arbitrum’s and Optimism’s compression space situation here:
https://research.arbitrum.io/t/compression-in-nitro/20
Here is a quick conclusion: we can expect to reduce fees by 30–40% by Optimism, and we can expect each tansaction for 1/3 of its uncompressed calldate size.
But we still have many diferent kinds of data and some of them is hard to compressed to the limit.
Modular is a good direction.
A modular blockchain is a blockchain that handles a specific function, such as execution, consensus, or data availability and relies on other blockchain and off-chain systems. We has introduced Celestia before and showed the logic of its way to scale Ethereum and other blockchains.
In sum, Celestia offers a solution of data abailability sampling(DAS) and Namespaced Merkle trees (NMTs). Nodes just need to download random parts of a block to verify the information is right or wrong. Of course, the participant of data availability committees and networks are needed for the whole procedure.
With many nodes randomly sampling a block, the probability of hiding block data reduces. If a node discovers a chunk of the block is unavailable, it can raise an alarm and alert other nodes. Here is also a good space for $TIA to play a key role.
A good thing needs to be mention is that with the upgrade of Dencun upgrade, Ethereum will have a better performance for user with cheaper transaction gas.
“Proto-Danksharding introduces data blobs that can be sent and attached to blocks. The data in these blobs is not accessible to the EVM and is automatically deleted after a fixed time period (1–3 months). This means rollups can send their data much more cheaply and pass the savings on to end users in the form of cheaper transactions.”
If you want to read more about Proto-Danksharding, also known as EIP-4844, you can click this Link.
