Quick Take

• Ethereum developers are moving toward including EIP-4844 in a future upgrade.
• EIP-4844 aims to improve the scalability of Ethereum beyond what’s available with Layer 2 solutions.

Ethereum core developers are moving toward putting EIP-4844 — a highly-anticipated scaling proposal — live in a future mainnet upgrade, according to an Ethereum core developer meeting. 

Developers have included EIP-4844, also called "proto-danksharding," into a list called “considered for inclusion (CFI),” meaning they have committed to working on the proposed feature. If everything goes as planned, this feature will be deployed on the mainnet sometime next year. The proposal might be rolled out with or after the Shanghai upgrade, which aims to open up staking withdrawals for validators.

EIP-4844 aims to improve the scalability of Ethereum beyond what's available with Layer 2 solutions. It will introduce a new kind of transaction format to Ethereum called "shard blob transactions,” allowing for off-chain data to be stored and accessed by Ethereum nodes temporarily to address scaling needs of blockchain apps.

This feature is intended to make Ethereum even cheaper when using Layer 2 rollup solutions like Optimism and Arbitrum, where transactions are already five to ten times cheaper than the Ethereum base layer.

“Reminder: EIP-4844 adds a new fee market to Ethereum for short-lived data. Rollups would use this for data availability instead of hijacking regular gas. This is a game changer for the rollup-centric roadmap, as fees could be lowered ~100x,” said Liam Horne, CEO of OP Labs, the developer of Optimism network.