Ethereum's hot new upgrade, the DENCUN upgrade explained: rollups, proto-danksharding,a bunch of other things

Hey there my fellow blockchain enthusiasts, cyberpunks,e/acc's, and I'm not forgetting about you my techno-optimists. Ethereum has created a new wave which has us all diving deep into the deets.

What's the BUZZ??

Ethereum has always been the cool rebel kid in the world of blockchain, unlike bitcoin which is a payment system Ethereum is a blockchain that can deploy smart contracts, and since it is turing complete, there's this concept of Gas fee which the fee the user pays for the transaction to go through to make sure that one contract won't drain all the resources of the blockchain(ex :infinite loops) like a blood sucking Vampire, or maybe like your toxic ex-sweetheart(Energy Vampire), you get the point

But the thing that really really sucks is that the gas fee is ridiculously high, you sometimes have to pay more gas than the transaction itself, absolutely bonkers right??

one more thing

the problem with the cool kid we are talking about is that it can't scale, currently it can only scale upto a 100,000 users the capacity of the entire blockchain is less than the daily active users of platforms like google, meta,etc.

which leads us to the million dollar question, "how tf are we supposed to bring revolution with $100+ gas fee and a system that can't scale"

I hear you, the solution is .....drum roll please........

"we work on reducing gas fee and scaling solutions for ethereum"(wow!! what a concept right?)

Layer 2's: THE MAGIC SHORTCUT

so what are L2's? think of it like the express lane of the blockchain highway,

HOW DOES IT WORK??

well it is relatively simple, Instead of processing all the transactions individually on the main Ethereum chain, L2's process all the transactions on a separate chain or even off-chain and later on they club a bunch of transactions, summarize them and pass them onto the main chain as a single transaction, so that the main chain doesn't have to keep track of all the nitty gritty details, which will reduce the gas fee and make transactions a lot more faster.

The technical term for this is called rollups!

to know more, look up Validium, optimistic rollups and zkrollups.

THE DENCUN UPGRADE

Finally, we are addressing the main topic, what is the dencun upgrade?

this this the upgrade that will allow millions of users to exist on L2's

this will speed up L2's by 45x - 100x

the main highlight of the Dencun upgrade is EIP-4844 : proto-danksharding

so what exactly is proto-danksharding

if you have any idea about databases, you probably already have a slight idea of what this might be about, of not no worries, keep reading...

Picture this, you have a hugeeee block of data, and you need to break it down into smaller chunks, it is like breaking down a pizza into slices (yum!!!), but instead of pepperoni and cheese, we are talking about blockchain data.

along with the details of a regular transaction it also carries an extra data called....

Binary large objects(blobs) are collections of data that are stored off-chain, they are faster and cheaper than the calldata which is currently being used, calldata is stored on every single block, forever. But blobs are temporarily stored(in every node)

Ethereum wants to delegate storing the historical details/record of all the transaction to some other protocol, and is focusing on scalability and providing real time secure transactions with minimal gas fee.

note blob data is not accessible to the EVM, only the commitment can be viewed

Future of Ethereum

the future is always unpredictable, although full dank sharding aims to make

Ethereum super scalable, it might also mess up the amount of eth being burnt, and also the cool kid may not continue to be cool anymore, there are new kids in the block like Solana and who knows there might be a cooler kid in the future or polkadot might finally have a super glow up, who knows who'll take our heart in the future?

but on the brighter side, Ethereum has the highest amount of devs, is simpler, the community is very supportive, you can create smart contracts in many languages and the foundation is very active and is filled with the smartest people, so only time will tell.

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