"Legitimacy", a word that literally contradicts the spirit of Web3, has recently started to appear more and more frequently in everyone's vision. In particular, the crypto community has launched a big discussion about the legitimacy of Ethereum DA, involving a number of current star projects such as EigenLayer and Celestia. Even Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has begun to speak out frequently. So what exactly is DA, and what does the debate surrounding its "legitimacy" mean?
01 What is DA?
DA, which stands for data availability, is an important part of today's modular blockchain architecture. Unlike a single blockchain, a modular blockchain splits different parts of a blockchain network into corresponding functional layers, such as execution, data availability, consensus, and settlement:
Execution: The execution layer responsible for processing transactions and status updates; Data Availability (DA layer): responsible for storing data required to verify the validity of transactions; Consensus: responsible for determining the order and finality of transactions within a block, that is, determining in what order transactions within the memory pool are included in which block; Settlement: responsible for verifying Rollup L2 state data and processing fraud proofs/validity proofs; Currently, with the heating up of the L2 war and the continuous development of the modular narrative, projects such as Rollup focusing on execution or Celestia focusing on data availability are emerging in an endless stream. In the modular world, the core function of data availability (DA) is to ensure that on-chain data is available and accessible to all network participants in order to reduce costs and expand blockchains.
So what are the benefits of this? First of all, it is naturally more specialized. Take the separation of data availability and execution as an example. In a modular architecture, a group of nodes can be responsible for DA, while another group (or multiple groups) of nodes are responsible for execution. Everyone has their own responsibilities. In this context, a dedicated DA layer can improve interoperability and reduce costs in addition to achieving higher throughput. Because in theory, every node in the blockchain network must download all transaction data to verify whether the data is available, which is an extremely inefficient and costly task, but it is also the way most blockchains currently work, and it is also an obstacle to scalability, because the amount of data required for verification increases linearly with the block size. Secondly, it greatly improves scalability, making each blockchain a Lego building block. Developers can build more scalable blockchains by combining specialized modular chains, making it easier and easier to deploy new L2s through Rollup-as-a-service providers such as Caldera, AltLayer, and Conduit.
So to put it simply, taking Ethereum's modularity as an example, it is to use the L1 main chain as the settlement and data availability layer, and various L2 solutions such as Rollup as the execution layer to achieve expansion. This is also Ethereum's roadmap to a modular blockchain stack. Once this transition is completed, users will be able to use L2 solutions while still benefiting from the security of Ethereum's base layer.
02 DA "orthodoxy" debate Why did Vitalik and the community have such a big discussion about DA recently?
What is the reason for the debate? It's simple. In addition to Ethereum (that is, directly submitting state data and proofs to Ethereum L1), new solutions such as Celesita, EigenLayer and Avail have emerged as mainstream projects in the data availability layer. With the development of Celestia, with its scalability, sovereignty, flexibility, shared security and other characteristics, it has competed with Ethereum in the data availability layer, and attracted some general Rollup L2s such as Manta and ZkFair to switch to Celestia. The most direct impact is the "broken window effect" of Manta Pacific migrating the data availability layer from Ethereum to Celestia. This is also the first L2 based on Celestia, which has aroused widespread discussion and attention in the Ethereum community.
For Manta Pacific, the motivation for doing so is undoubtedly to reduce the cost of data availability. According to official disclosures, since the DA layer was migrated to Celestia, the cost has been reduced by 99.81% compared to using the Ethereum mainnet, which is an exponential decrease. Of course, a third-party DA solution like Celestia has definitely sacrificed a certain degree of security compared to Rollup with Ethereum as the DA layer, but for these L2 trade-offs, which DA to choose is related to cost and security, but the impact of cost is undoubtedly more critical. Therefore, new projects such as Aleo, Dymension, and ZKFair have successively invested in new DA solutions such as Celestia to reduce costs. Even Polygon has chosen to turn to NEAR and bluntly stated that it is "8,000 times cheaper than Ethereum."
It is foreseeable that as long as the cost advantage continues to exist, there will be more and more L2s that integrate new DA solutions such as Celestia in the future, which has caused a great impact on Ethereum, especially arousing the competition between the Ethereum community and the Celesita team for the right to define Ethereum L2. Therefore, the DA "orthodoxy" debate, in short, is about the debate on the universal Rollup L2 to replace the DA layer from Ethereum to modular blockchain DAs such as Celesita and Avail.
03 The hidden line of DA track development behind the scenes In general, the flourishing of related DA solutions such as Celestia has indeed weakened the competitiveness of Ethereum DA to a certain extent. Specifically, it is not only Celestia that has an impact on the "orthodoxy" of Ethereum. If the current DA track is classified from a macro perspective (excluding centralized solutions), it can be roughly divided into four categories: Ethereum blob/Danksharding; independent decentralized DAs such as Celestia; EigenDA/MantleDA (DA using ETH restaking); newcomers such as NEAR; Celestia, of course, needs no further explanation, and is regarded by many community users as a "rigid need" for the huge economic benefits brought by L2 Gas fees. In particular, Ethereum projects such as Manta, ZKFair, Arbitrum Orbit, general L2 Eclipse, decentralized API data service protocol Pocket Network, and modular blockchain network Movement Labs are already using Celestia.
Once the scale effect is formed, it may indeed continue to erode Ethereum's fee income, grow into a specialized DA giant, and obtain a very high valuation premium (Ethereum's share of losses). In addition, EigenDA makes full use of Ethereum's existing infrastructure, relies on Ethereum, and extends Ethereum's security consensus through Restaking. Therefore, it is essentially maintaining the "orthodoxy" of Ethereum DA and enhancing Ethereum's DA capabilities. NEAR is also a "new" seed player. In addition to the Polygon mentioned above, Arbitrum Orbit has also integrated Near DA, allowing developers to launch their own configurable Rollup based on Arbitrum's technology. In general, from the soaring market price of TIA, it can be seen that the DA track is gradually entering everyone's mainstream vision as the new pattern of L1&2 evolves.
From this perspective, the game about DA's "legitimacy" will also become a main narrative in 2024, and may even evolve into a new "Ethereum killer". As for what kind of new project can be launched, let us wait and see.
