Ethereum Pushes Anti-Censorship Upgrade for March
Ethereum core developers are moving forward with the network's next major upgrade, Cancun-Deneb, which includes features designed to bolster censorship resistance and transaction neutrality. The upgrade is scheduled for March, proceeding with strong support from co-founder Vitalik Buterin despite some pushback from the mining sector.
- The centerpiece of the upgrade is EIP-4844, also known as Proto-Danksharding, which introduces a new transaction type that carries data in temporary, cost-effective "blobs". This mechanism is designed to significantly lower data fees for Layer 2 rollups, laying the groundwork for full data sharding in the future. - By creating a separate channel for rollup data, Proto-Danksharding is expected to slash Layer 2 transaction fees by a factor of 10 to 100. This directly benefits high-throughput DeFi protocols and other applications built on L2s like Arbitrum and Optimism. - The "blobs" introduced in EIP-4844 are large chunks of data (up to 128kb each) that are stored on the consensus layer for a limited time—around 18 days—rather than being permanently stored on the execution layer. This temporary availability is why the data is significantly cheaper than using permanent `CALLDATA`. - The upgrade also bundles several other technical improvements, including EIP-1153 for "transient storage" to optimize block space and reduce data storage costs for smart contracts, and EIP-6780, which limits the functionality of the `SELFDESTRUCT` opcode to reduce risks. - While the Cancun-Deneb upgrade focuses on scalability, a more direct anti-censorship feature known as Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists (FOCIL) is being planned for a future upgrade named Hegota. - FOCIL aims to enforce censorship resistance at the protocol level by allowing block proposers to specify a list of transactions that must be included by block builders, addressing concerns that arose after OFAC sanctions on Tornado Cash led to some validators excluding certain transactions. - The long-term goal of Proto-Danksharding is to pave the way for full Danksharding, which will expand data availability to enable the network to support hundreds of rollups and scale to over 100,000 transactions per second.
