Since the release of the Ethereum whitepaper in 2013, Ethereum has gone through nine years of development. During this long and glorious period, Ethereum has successfully undergone 11 major upgrades, each injecting new narratives and opportunities into its ecosystem. In the current Serenity phase (Ethereum 2.0), founder Vitalik Buterin plans to complete the upgrade roadmap in six stages, focusing on scalability, security, consensus mechanisms, and economic model optimization. From the Ethereum roadmap released by Vitalik Buterin, the Dencun upgrade is part of the “The Surge” phase of the Ethereum upgrade roadmap.
The Surge
The Surge phase is mainly aimed at addressing the long-standing scalability issue and aims to eventually achieve Ethereum’s performance level of 100,000 transactions per second (TPS), approaching the speed of traditional electronic payments. This upgrade is achieved through Danksharding (“DS”), which is the focus of this article, and is planned to be implemented in the KanKun upgrade this year.
What is the KanKun upgrade?
The KanKun upgrade is an important upgrade for Ethereum, aimed at increasing data storage and reducing costs. The KanKun upgrade consists of five Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), with EIP-4844 being the most market-focused. Its main purpose is to address Ethereum’s scalability issues and help reduce transaction costs for Ethereum Layer2 solutions, benefiting the L2 and related ecosystems. In addition to the core EIP-4844, other improvement proposals include EIP-1153, EIP-4788, EIP-5656, and EIP-6780.
On January 17th and 30th, 2024, Ethereum began testing the KanKun upgrade on the Goerli and Sepolia test networks. The test networks are currently operating normally, with a normal number of Blob submissions. There will be further testing with Holesky on February 7th, and the mainnet implementation date has not been announced yet.
EIP-4844 (Proto-Danksharding)
Currently, all transaction data for Ethereum Layer 2 is stored in Layer 1’s Calldata. However, Calldata space is limited and cannot meet the growing storage needs, resulting in high data usage costs and increased computational burden on Ethereum nodes. The KanKun upgrade will introduce Blob, a data storage structure newly introduced by EIP-4844, specifically designed to store transaction data submitted from Layer 2 to Layer 1. Blobs are stored on the consensus layer separately from Calldata and cannot be accessed by the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). The purpose of Blobs is to allow the stored data to be accessed and verified by the demand side within a certain period of time (automatically deleted within about one month) without the need for Layer 1 to execute all of it, greatly reducing node burden.
Currently, the size of a Blob is fixed at 128 KB. Therefore, a single Rollup can only directly purchase the entire Blob and cannot selectively purchase a part of the data. Overall, attaching six complete Blobs to a block will increase the block size by about 40%. Considering that the current block size can reach approximately 1.875 MB, a complete set of Blobs may increase by about 0.75 MB. And this increase occurs in an 18-day rolling cycle, so network nodes do not increase their long-term storage capacity.
New Precompiled Point Evaluation Precompile
In addition, EIP-4844 also introduces a new precompiled called Point Evaluation Precompile, which allows Optimistic Rollup and ZK Rollup to easily verify data related to Blobs. In Optimistic Rollup, the main purpose of Point Evaluation Precompile is to verify the underlying data provided when submitting fraud proofs. In ZK Rollup, Point Evaluation Precompile is mainly used to verify two critical commitments: Blob commitments and ZK Rollup commitments. By utilizing Point Evaluation Precompile, ZK Rollups can effectively prove that these two commitments point to the same data, ensuring data consistency and providing reliability and security guarantees for the entire ZK Rollup system.
EIP-1153 (Instant Storage Opcode)
Currently, all data storage on Ethereum follows a permanent storage model, including storing temporary data during contract execution, resulting in waste and consuming a large amount of gas fees. EIP-1153 aims to introduce a new mechanism for handling temporary or instant storage during smart contract execution. The introduction of instant storage opcodes allows smart contracts to use instant storage, where smart contracts can read and invoke temporary storage data during one complete transaction execution cycle and directly clear temporary data after the transaction execution cycle ends.
EIP-4788 (Beacon Block Root Submission)
The current independent nature of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and the Beacon Chain (Ethereum’s consensus layer) has brought some challenges. The EVM cannot directly access the Beacon Chain and can only obtain data and state from the Beacon Chain through external trusted oracles. This mode has risks such as oracle failures and malicious manipulation. EIP-4788 will place a Beacon Chain block root on each execution block header, allowing the EVM to directly obtain the state and data of the Ethereum consensus layer. This is equivalent to introducing a protocol-level oracle, improving operational efficiency and accuracy, and eliminating risks associated with external oracles.
EIP-5656 (MCOPY Opcode)
EIP-5656 introduces the MCOPY opcode, which optimizes the process of copying data in memory during smart contract execution. Memory copying refers to the process of moving data from one location in memory to another, which is a fundamental operation used in computations to construct data structures and copy objects. The adoption of the MCOPY opcode will reduce the gas fees for related operations and improve the efficiency of contract execution.
EIP-6780 (Limiting SELFDESTRUCT)
As the name suggests, the existing SELFDESTRUCT opcode allows developers to completely remove smart contracts from the blockchain using this opcode. After execution, the contract’s code and storage are removed from Ethereum, and the remaining ETH in the contract is sent to a specified address. This operation involves significant changes to the state of accounts, as it involves removing deployed contract code and storage data from the chain.
EIP-6780 aims to limit the usage of the SELFDESTRUCT opcode. It will only take effect when creating a smart contract and executing the SELFDESTRUCT opcode in the same transaction. In other cases, no code or storage deletion will occur.
In conclusion, as a pioneer in blockchain technology, Ethereum has been continuously pushing for updates and upgrades to meet the growing business demands and user expectations. The KanKun upgrade is an important step for Ethereum in its roadmap for scalability and performance enhancement.
With the implementation of the KanKun upgrade, Ethereum has made significant progress in terms of security, scalability, and sustainability, laying a solid foundation for a wider range of blockchain applications.
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