A detailed explanation of DA ecology and competition landscape

Source: IOSG Ventures

Background

Two years ago, at the dawn of the modular blockchain narrative, we wrote about our Views and forecasts on the Data Availability track. As we expected, the modular blockchain narrative has taken hold and driven infrastructure innovation, enhanced network interoperability, and fostered more collaboration and integration within the ecosystem, with various Rollup-as-a-Service (RaaS) solutions (Altlayer, Caldera, Conduit, Gelato) started to emerge. The figure below shows the interface of the Rollup development tool Conduit, showing that deploying Rollup and selecting a DA solution have become extremely simple and convenient.

Source: Conduit

In the past two years, alternative DA solutions (Alt-DA) such as Celestia, EigenDA, Avail, and NearDA have achieved significant development, each demonstrating unique technology advantages and market share. At the same time, with the launch of Ethereum EIP-4844, blobs are introduced to replace calldata, which greatly reduces the cost of using Rollup in the native DA layer of Ethereum. Nowadays, developers and project parties face more trade-offs when choosing the data availability layer. This article will track and analyze existing DA solutions, deeply explore their performance costs, technical characteristics and market performance, and propose our views on the future DA track. Developmental perspectives and reflections.

1. Adoption status of existing DA solutions

Rollups using Ethereum’s native DA on-chain solutions are mainly focused on mainstream Layer 2 that have been updated from calldata storage to adapt to Blobs. Solutions include Arbitrum, Optimism and Base, as well as Starknet, zkSync and Scroll, etc. By using Ethereum as the DA layer, Rollup's data will be verified and stored by Ethereum's full nodes, benefiting from Ethereum's security, decentralization, continuity of protocol upgrades, and economic incentive mechanisms. Comprehensive L2 occupies an important position in the Ethereum ecosystem and needs the above-mentioned legitimacy brought by native DA as a core difference. (Vitalik believes that the core of rollup is an unconditional security guarantee: even if everyone is against you, you can still withdraw your assets. If data availability depends on external systems, you cannot get this equivalent security)

However, publishing data to the Ethereum mainnet comes with high costs, especially before EIP-4844 (calldata cost is 16 gas per byte, only in December 2023, L2 on DA cost It cost over 15,000 ETH). Therefore, a variety of Alt-DA off-chain solutions have emerged, such as Celestia, EigenDA, which are already online, and Avail, which is not yet online. They reduce data storage and transmission through different technical means, such as DAS, erasure coding, KZG commitment, etc. the cost of.

Among them, Celestia, as a modular blockchain specially used for DA, has become the leading project on the DA track after the mainnet is launched in October 2023. Its main target customers include those who need modular architecture. Projects: cross-chain bridges, settlement layer solutions, defi projects, games, sequencers, and Layer 2 solutions that are not limited to the Ethereum ecosystem. Its existing customers include Omnichain DEX protocol Orderly, modular L2 Manta Pacific customized for EVM-native ZK applications, Base-based L3 Hokum, and DEX Lyra and Aevo focusing on derivatives trading. As a pioneer in modular design DA layer that is not limited to a specific ecosystem, Celestia's advantages make it the first choice for many emerging Layer 2 projects.

EigenDA was developed by EigenLabs. It uses EigenLayer's restaking mechanism to provide an efficient, secure and scalable DA service solution, inheriting the security of the Ethereum main network and the huge validator network to a certain extent. EigenDA focuses on providing high-performance DA solutions for the Ethereum ecosystem. As the first active verification service (AVS) on Eigenlayer, EigenDA was launched together with the Eigenlay mainnet in April. The existing customer base is equally diverse, including Ethereum L2 Swell, Celo, Mantle Network, and many other platforms built on Eigenlayer. Other AVS, such as decentralized computing stack Versatus, Polymer, DEX protocol DODO and CyberConnect as Social L2, etc.

Source: EigenDA

2. Tradeoffs between native DA (EIP-4844) and existing Alt-DA

2.1 Ethereum native DA

A brief review of the development and changes of Ethereum’s native DA solution. Before the Cancun upgrade, Rollup mainly used calldata as a means of data storage and transmission. High costs due to persistent storage and high network congestion are major barriers to expansion and adoption. As a mainnet upgrade, EIP-4844 introduces a new data structure called Blobs. Blobs can accommodate large-capacity data, but will increase the storage burden on nodes. Over time, storage requirements will continue to increase, which may eventually lead to excessive hardware requirements for running nodes and harm decentralization. Therefore, blobs only need to be stored for about 18 days (4096 epochs) before being deleted.

Since Blobs only need temporary storage and use a separate cost market, after the implementation of EIP-4844, the average daily DA cost of 60 days before and after the major L2 adopts blobs (Scroll & Starknet will take 30 days before and after days), the cost reduction is around 99%. Among them, due to the different types of uploaded data (transaction data or status differences), Layer 2 using OP rollup benefits more obviously from the cost reduction compared to Zk Rollup.

Source: Dune& Growthepie

EIP-4844 Blob capacity and storage characteristics and pricing mechanism

Blob capacity and storage characteristics:

• Each block can hold up to 6 Blobs

• Each Blob can store up to 128KB of data (the sender pays for the full Blob even if the 128KB space is not fully used)

< p>The new blob gas market operates similarly to EIP-1559, adjusting the basic blob fee according to changes in supply and demand:

• If the number of blobs in the block exceeds the target (currently 3), increase the blob base fee.

• If the number of blobs in the block is less than the target, reduce the blob base fee.

< p style="text-align: center;">Source: IOSG Ventures

Source: Dune / 3-day moving average of the number of Ethereum block blobs

L2 mainly uses the newly introduced type 3 transactions, adding max_fee_per_blob_gas and blob_versioned_hashes fields based on previous transactions, which represent the user's willingness to pay respectively. The maximum gas cost per blob and the hash output list of kzg_to_versioned_hash.

This new pricing mechanism means that type 3 transactions still require the max_fee_per_gas and max_priority_fee_per_gas fields and are subject to the existing EIP-1559 market. In addition to blob space, Type 3 transactions still pay for the EVM space they use.

Therefore, blobs still have competition for block space, causing cost uncertainty, because the blob space of each block is limited, and the blob gas fee market is dynamically adjusted according to demand.

Therefore, as a general chain, Ethereum’s shortcoming lies in the uncertainty of the block space - there may be sudden emergence of on-chain activities such as NFT Mining and airdrop claims, causing congestion on the chain. Blob The pricing will be inflated, leaving Rollup with no way to estimate its cost base. This will lead to uncertainty in Rollup's expenditure budget, leading to unstable profit margins, and raising barriers to use for new projects that are still in their infancy. It is difficult for the project team to determine whether Ethereum DA can be used as a long-term solution. In the figure below, using blobs is about 98% cheaper than using calldata most of the time. However, as shown in the figure below, using blobs during a certain period of time is only 59% cheaper than using calldata.

Source: Ethernow

We calculate the cost of two blob transfers for example:

Source: Ethernow

The picture shows a Type 3 transaction of Zksync's Validator Timelock in a certain block on March 28, 2024. Based on the blob cost, we perform basic cost and priority cost decomposition to calculate its data cost:

Assuming the price of Ethereum is $3600, the data cost of using 1Mib blob at that time is approximately:

4×0.018ETH×3600USD/ETH = 259.2USD< /p>

Let’s take another zksync era type 3 transaction on June 24:

Source: Ethernow

At that time, mainnet activity dropped slightly. Let’s break down and calculate the data cost:

The data cost of using 1Mib blob at that time was approximately:

4×0.0021ETH×3600USD/ETH = 30.24USD

This shows that the cost of using blobs to transmit data is uncertain and is still relatively high. However, for a rollup, the stability of the cost structure is one of the key considerations when choosing a DA solution.

2.2 Celestia

As the originator of modular blockchain, Celestia focuses on providing DA layer and consensus layer, separating the execution layer, thus Specifically optimized DA function to improve efficiency and scalability. As an off-chain solution, Celestia's L1 has many different technical features compared to the method using the Ethereum chain, thereby reducing the cost of data availability and providing relatively higher flexibility and scalability. The modular design makes Celestia extremely flexible, allowing developers to freely choose the execution environment without being limited to a specific virtual machine (VM), allowing Celestia to support a variety of application scenarios and meet diverse needs.

If Rollup wants to integrate Celestia as the DA layer, it needs to submit the transaction data (Data Blob) generated by the execution layer to the Celestia network instead of the original Layer 1 (Ethereum) to ensure data availability for verification and trade. Celestia's Data Availability Sampling (DAS) technology re-encodes block data using a two-dimensional RS erasure coding scheme, allowing light nodes to only download a small part of the block data to verify the availability of the data through multiple rounds of random sampling. , and allows multiple nodes to process different data parts in parallel, improving overall efficiency.

Source: Celestia.org

Another key technology in the process is the namespace Merkle trees (NMTs) introduced by Celestia ) technology allows different rollups to only download transaction data related to themselves, thereby improving data processing efficiency. NMTs not only reduce data redundancy and improve system performance, but also provide developers with more efficient data processing methods.

In terms of security, Celestia is based on The Tendermint consensus mechanism allows validators to reach consensus on the Data Blob, ensuring the availability and consistency of data in the network, and can tolerate the failure or malicious behavior of up to one-third of the validator nodes. By staking TIA tokens, Celestia's validators are financially incentivized to ensure honest behavior and receive slashing penalties for malicious behavior or improper operations, thereby ensuring the security of the network. The current TVL of Celestia is approximately US$6.44 billion, and the number of full nodes is 100.

Concerning scalability, Celestia’s block size can be dynamically adjusted based on the number of active light nodes in the network. As more nodes are added, Celestia can safely increase the block size, theoretically increasing throughput and scalability infinitely. Current data shows that its data throughput is approximately 6.67 MB/s.

Celestia Blob capacity and storage characteristics and pricing mechanism:

For cost comparison, we briefly discuss the performance and pricing mechanism of celestia here. When users submit data on Celestia, they submit Blob transactions (BlobTx), and the fee consists of blob space fees and gas fees.

Specifically, the maximum size limit per blob is slightly less than 2 MiB (1,973,786 bytes), and each chunk can contain multiple blobs, depending on the total size limit of the chunk. The current maximum block size is 64x64 shares (approximately 2 MiB), with a total of 4096 shares, of which one share is reserved for PFB (PayForBlobs) transactions and the remaining 4095 shares are used for data storage. Celestia’s fee market is similar to Ethereum’s EIP-1559 mechanism, using a priority mempool based on gas price. Transactions with higher transaction fees are prioritized by validators and are made up of a fixed fee per transaction and a variable fee based on the size of each blob.

According to the comprehensive statistics of rollup data on celenium (June 17), for each customer integrating Celestia, the DA cost of using Celestia is between 0.02-0.25 Tia/Mib, equivalent to June 17 The price of $TIA ($7.26), and the DA cost of several major customers range from $0.15 - $1.82/MiB. Therefore, Celestia offers a competitive and stable cost structure compared to native DA on the Ethereum chain.

Source: Celenium

Source: Celenium, gas price is stable Around 0.015UTIA (1 uTIA = TIA × 10 − 6)

However, Celestia itself is a Layer1 blockchain network and requires a P2P network for Data Blob Broadcasting and consensus. Although light nodes can use DAS to ensure data availability, the network still has high requirements for its full nodes (128 MB/s download and 12.5 MB/s upload), which provides decentralization and future throughput improvements. bring obstacles. In contrast, EigenDA adopts a different architecture - no consensus is required, and no P2P network is required.

2.3 EigenDA

As an active verification service (AVS) built using EigenLayer, EigenDA uses the re-pledge mechanism. Utilizing the security of Ethereum (no need to introduce a new validator set, Ethereum validators can freely choose to join, EigenDA's re-pledge nodes are a subset of Ethereum nodes) to ensure data availability, and directly utilize existing There is infrastructure. The main workflow is that the Rollup sequencer generates Blob Data and sends it to Disperser (which can be run by rollup itself or through a third party, such as EigenLabs). Disperser will fragment the Blob Data and generate erasure codes and KZG commitments. Then publish it to the EigenDA node, and then the EigenDA node will verify the Attestation and ensure data availability. After the verification is completed, the node needs to store the data and send the digital signature back to Disperser. Finally, Disperser collects the signatures and uploads them to the EigenDA smart contract on the Ethereum mainnet for final verification of the correctness of the aggregated signatures.

The core idea is still to use technology to reduce the requirements for data storage and verification computing power of nodes. However, EigenDA chose to implement it using KZG commitment verification technology that is consistent with the Ethereum upgrade. In addition, EigenDA does not rely on consensus protocols and P2P propagation, but uses unicast to further increase consensus speed.

To ensure that the EigenDA node actually stores the data available, EigenDA uses the Proof of Custody method. If it occurs, anyone with a lazy validator can submit a proof to the EigenDA smart contract. The proof will be verified by a smart contract. If validation succeeds, the lazy validator will be slashed.

Therefore, EigenDA’s solution process is all carried out on Ethereum, and Ethereum provides consensus guarantees. Therefore, it does not have to be limited by the bottleneck of the consensus protocol and the low throughput of the P2P network, and the nodes do not need to wait for sequential sorting. , data availability proof can be directly processed in parallel, greatly improving network efficiency.

Source: Eigenlayer

EigenDA’s capacity performance and cost:

EigenDA currently has 266 node operators. Its maximum throughput target is 10Mbps. According to the 7-day average data, EigenDA’s data throughput is 0.685Mib/s, and the data storage and transmission cost is approximately 0.001Gas/Byte. In other words, assuming the gas cost is 10gwei and the Ethereum price is $3600, the cost per 1MB of data is approximately to $0.038. The total pledged TVL is 3.33M ETH, which is close to 1.2 billion US dollars.

Source: EigenDA.xyz

Comprehensive comparative analysis Celestia  vs. EigenDA

From a technical perspective, Celestia and EigenDA differ in several ways. First of all, in terms of node load, Celestia's full node needs to process broadcast, consensus and verification, with a download bandwidth requirement of 128MB/s and an upload bandwidth requirement of 12.5MB/s, while EigenDA's node does not process broadcast and consensus, and the bandwidth requirement is only 0.3MB/s, and it can use a subset of Ethereum nodes. Secondly, in terms of throughput, Celestia's maximum throughput is about 6.67MB/s, while EigenDA targets a maximum of 10MB/s. In terms of security, Celestia’s security comes from its network value, with a staked value of approximately $6.65 billion and an attack cost of over $4 billion. EigenDA inherits a portion of the security of Ethereum based on the re-pledged asset value and the mainnet operator share. The current TVL is close to $1.2 billion, and it inherits approximately 2% of the security of Ethereum.

Taken together, Celestia’s competitive advantage lies in its flexible modular design and high data throughput, making it more popular among small and medium-sized L2 and application chains. The advantage of EigenDA is the legitimacy brought by using Ethereum infrastructure to decouple data availability and consensus. In the future, with the development of the dual trends of modularization and application chains, Celestia may benefit from the incremental market, while EigenDA may occupy a larger share of the Ethereum central market that requires higher security.

3. Avail and NearDA

Although Celestia and EigenDA currently dominate the data availability market, the competitive landscape may change in the future. With the potential launch of the two projects Avail and NearDA, competition in the field of data availability is expected to further intensify.

Avail is a blockchain network focused on data availability, designed to provide efficient transaction ordering and data storage services for EVM-compatible blockchains and Rollups. It adopts the BABE and GRANDPA consensus mechanisms inherited from the Polkadot SDK. Avail uses KZG polynomial commitments as proof of validity, supports up to 1,000 validators using Nominated Proof of Stake (NPoS), and is provided through a unique light client P2P network sampling mechanism. Reliable backup.

On the other hand, NearDA is a data availability solution launched by the NEAR Foundation, which mainly provides DA services for ETH Rollup and Ethereum developers. It aims to provide a cost-effective DA solution with a level of decentralization comparable to Near Protocol. It has already established strategic partnerships with major players in the Ethereum ecosystem such as Polygon CDK, Arbitrum, and Optimism.  

In the short term, for Rollups, reducing marginal costs more effectively is the best way to establish barriers, and adjusting revenue and cost models according to market conditions is a better solution.

4. DA for specific scenarios

In addition to the above-mentioned universal DA for rollup, some relatively early DA projects for specific scenarios have also emerged on the current DA track, such as Zerogravity (0G), a high-throughput DA solution customized for AI, and Bit Coin DA solution Nubit.

4.1 Zerogravity (0G)

The requirements for data availability of AI applications and Traditional blockchain applications are different. AI model training and operation requires processing large amounts of data, including model parameters, training data sets, real-time data requests, etc. This data needs to be stored and transmitted quickly and reliably to ensure the efficiency and performance of AI models. However, existing general-purpose DA solutions, such as Celestia and EigenDA, are mainly designed to meet the data availability requirements of ordinary blockchain applications and have certain limitations when handling ultra-high throughput, low-latency large-scale data transmission.

ZeroGravity (0G) hopes to specifically address the needs of AI applications through modular design and high-performance data transfer. Its modular design divides the data availability workflow into two channels: data publishing and data storage, allowing the system to expand linearly as the number of nodes increases. The data storage channel focuses on big data transmission, ensuring that big data can be stored and accessed almost instantaneously. The data release channel is used to ensure the availability of data, which is verified through an arbitration system based on the majority honesty assumption. 0G Storage is an on-chain database composed of a network of storage nodes. Storage nodes participate through the Proof of Random Access (PoRA) mining process, ensuring data availability and integrity. It supports storage of various types of AI-related data, including models, training data, user requests, and real-time retrieval augmentation generation (RAG) data.

Source: 0G

0G claims that its goal is to achieve gigabytes per second through innovative system design On-chain data transmission far exceeds other DA solutions currently on the market (such as Celestia and EigenDA's MB-level data transmission per second). Specifically, 0G claims that its data throughput can reach 50 to 100 GB per second, which can support scenarios such as AI model training that require large amounts of data transmission.

4.2 Nubit

As the Bitcoin ecosystem gradually starts to gain attention, various technical routes related to Bitcoin are also surging. With these technologies With the development of routes, Ordinals, Layer 2, oracles and other applications have increasingly urgent needs for efficient and secure data availability solutions. These applications need to be able to store and transmit large amounts of data quickly and reliably to ensure their proper operation and enhance the user experience. For example, Ordinals require efficient data storage and transmission to support the creation and trading of digital artworks, Layer 2 solutions require high throughput and low latency for better scalability, and oracles require reliable data transmission to ensure data accuracy and timeliness.

Nubit is the first native data availability (DA) layer project in the Bitcoin ecosystem, aiming to solve the problem of limited throughput of the Bitcoin mainnet and provide infrastructure support for the long-term development of the Bitcoin ecosystem. . Nubit's workflow includes multiple steps such as data submission, verification, broadcast, storage, sampling and consensus to ensure efficient data processing and high availability. After the data submitted by the user is processed by RS encoding, it is verified by the verifier node using the NuBFT consensus algorithm and generates a KZG commitment. The verified data blocks are broadcast to the entire network, the storage nodes are responsible for storing the complete data blocks, and the light clients verify the availability of the data through the Data Availability Sampling (DAS) protocol. Even in the event of a network failure, nodes can still recover data through full storage nodes and KZG commitments on the Bitcoin network.

Nubit aims to support Bitcoin Ecological projects provide infrastructure and have established cooperative relationships with multiple projects such as Babylon, Merlin Chain, Polyhedra, etc. Nubit will reduce data storage costs. For example, when the demand for the inscription market surges, Nubit can serve and significantly reduce the cost of Bitcoin Layer 2. Data publishing costs make storing and processing data on Bitcoin more affordable.

5. Closing Thoughts

Analyzing the project differences of the DA track, we are in safety ( Including data integrity, network consensus, etc.), customizability and interoperability, performance and cost. With the widespread adoption of these DA solutions and the differences in DA layer selection among different projects, we see a series of unique technologies and markets position.

In the future, we believe that more App-Rollups will be launched on the market. However, although the potential market is increasing, the head effect on the DA track is obvious. Celestia, EigenDA, etc. will occupy the main market share, leaving few opportunities for the waist and tail, and competition is also intensifying. The current capacity exceeds demand for Rollup. For example, after the launch of the mainnet, the utilization rate of Celestia network bandwidth has been below 0.1% for a long time, which is far below its maximum daily supported capacity of 46,080 MB. However, compared to Ethereum’s current 15 rollups and 700 MB of data per day, Celestia still has a lot of room for activity.

Of course, it is not ruled out that in the future there may be demands for high DA bandwidth in high-performance networks, or for AI projects. In addition, there are some relatively early DAs for specific scenarios, such as Bitcoin DA, which may be used in Segments can gain good market share. But DA is essentially a to B business, and the income of DA project parties is closely related to the quantity and quality of ecological projects. At this stage, we believe that there is no need for too many off-chain DA solutions on the market unless its cost and efficiency achieve a leap of several orders of magnitude.

In general, it seems that DA’s business model currently has sufficient supply, but the development of the track is still evolving, and various solutions show different competitiveness in terms of technology and market positioning. . Future development will depend on continued technological innovation and dynamic changes in market demand.