What is Danksharding? 

Danksharding is an aspirational point that the Ethereum community is working towards. Once it is brought to life, the process will scale the Ethereum blockchain to process over 100,000 transactions per second (TPS). 

While the desired endpoint is danksharding, the Ethereum community hasn’t quite reached it yet and qualifies its current state as “proto-danksharding,” which will be explained below.

What are Layer 2 blockchains?

Layer 2 blockchains, also known as L2 blockchains, are protocols that work with existing blockchains (known as L1 blockchains) to make them more scalable and efficient. There are different types of L2 blockchains. Each processes its transactions differently. 

When talking about danksharding, we’re specifically discussing rollup blockchains, like Optimistic Rollups or zk (zero knowledge) rollups. These blockchains “roll up” multiple transactions into a single transaction to increase transaction speed, but when doing so, they also increase the amount of data that is stored on the blockchain.

In addition to increasing TPS, danksharding hopes to minimize how much data is stored on the blockchain. 

What is Proto-Danksharding? 

In the interim, while danksharding still being finalized, the EIP-4844 introduced “proto-danksharding.” 

Named after the two researchers who proposed it — Protolambda and Dankrad Feist — proto-danksharding introduces a different option for how roll-up transactions are posted to the blockchain. 

As Ethereum explains, right now, roll-up transactions are posted as CALLDATA — this makes it both expensive and takes up a lot of space because each transaction lives on the chain forever. Proto-danksharding proposes that instead of posting transactions as CALLDATA each transaction should be posted as a “blob.” Blobs are not accessible by the EVM and are automatically deleted within 3 months of posting. This limits how much space each transaction takes on the blockchain and can be processed more cheaply for end users. 

Under proto-danksharding, each transaction is secured by attaching a polynomial equation known as a “commitment.” Each commitment is then verified at various points in its transaction journey. 

How are danksharding and proto-danksharding different? 

While Ethereum notes that danksharding is still years from reality, when it does roll out for the Ethereum community, it will build upon what proto-danksharding is currently proposing.

On Ethereum, it is explained as the following: 

“The way this works is by expanding the blobs attached to blocks from 1 in Proto-Danksharding to 64 in full Danksharding. The rest of the changes required are all updates to the way consensus clients operate to enable them to handle the new large blobs. Several of these changes are already on the roadmap for other purposes independent of Danksharding.” 

When will danksharding roll out for the Ethereum community? 

Danksharding does not have a specific release date, but proto-danksharding should arrive in the near future, according to Ethereum. 

The EIP for proto-danksharding has continued to move along in its process toward final adoption. This includes a KZG ceremony, which is when members of the Ethereum community generate a random string of numbers that verify the data. With each new string of data that is created, members delete any previous reference on their machine. Currently, EIP-4844 KZG ceremony includes over 50,000 contributors. 

But as Ethereum notes: 

“The EIP for Proto-Danksharding is mature, the specification is agreed and the clients have implemented prototypes that are currently being tested and made production-ready. The next step is to implement the changes on a public testnet.”