Original title: ETH's Next NFT Revolution
By William M. Peaster, Bankless
Translated by: Yvonne, Mars Finance
It’s not every day that one of the world’s largest blockchain projects undergoes a major evolution.
That’s why all eyes are now on Ethereum, as the leading smart contract platform is set to undergo a major upgrade that will introduce a never-before-seen mechanism: Blobspace.
The arrival of blobs on Ethereum will usher in the first golden age of L2 scaling solutions, which in turn will spark a revolution in how builders and users handle NFTs.
In today’s post, let’s quickly review EIP-4844 and blobspaces and some key points to watch in the future.
Preparing for EIP-4844 and Blobspace NFTs
101: The Cancun-Deneb (also known as Dencun) hard fork upgrade, which will be deployed on Ethereum on March 13, 2024, heralds the Ethereum network entering the Surge era, which aims to double down on scalability.
At the heart of Dencun is the introduction of EIP-4844, which will enable a native fork, blobspaces, a breakthrough innovation designed to help Ethereum’s L2 ecosystem move towards 100,000 transactions per second (TPS).
Why it matters: Blobspace is poised to revolutionize the Ethereum ecosystem by significantly reducing gas fees. This reduction in gas fees is particularly important for Ethereum L2 solutions, making transactions on them significantly cheaper, supporting their growth and increasing their appeal to a wider user base.
How Blobspace works: The core of Blobspace is to introduce a new way of processing transaction data through blobs (temporary blocks of transaction data efficiently stored on the blockchain).
This system is different from traditional block storage. It uses a pricing mechanism, namely "blob gas", which is independent of the main Ethereum gas market.
Blobs are created by breaking data into smaller pieces, which are then mathematically converted into unique identifiers for storage and later retrieval. This process not only optimizes data storage on the blockchain, but also ensures that transactions are processed more quickly and cost-effectively.
What happens next? With the implementation of the Dencun upgrade, Ethereum L2 will need to manually integrate this new technology to gain benefits. For example, Optimism plans to launch the Ecotone upgrade immediately after the Dencun deployment to implement blobspace in its Superchain ecosystem (such as Optimism, Base, Zora Network, etc.).
While it may take several months to complete integration work on all the different L2 platforms, the overall expectation is for rapid adoption across the Ethereum ecosystem, ushering in a new era of efficiency and scalability for the leading smart contract network.
Estimating Savings: The Optimism community developed the “Superchain Savings Estimator”, a tool designed to estimate how much the gas costs of the Optimism Superchain L2 might be reduced after adopting blobspace.
With this tool, examples such as swapping on Uniswap on Base or minting Zora NFTs on Zora have shown significant drops in transaction fees - in some cases, by as much as 98%. Based on Superchain’s recent average transaction assumptions, some clear examples are as follows:
Perform a Uniswap swap on Base:
Previous cost: $0.5822
Estimated cost: $0.0106
Decrease: 98.18%
Zora Minted NFTs on the Zora Network:
Previous cost: $0.3013
Estimated cost: $0.0061
Decrease: 97.98%
Minting Mirror NFTs on Optimism:
Previous cost: $0.2032
Estimated cost: $0.0128
Decrease: 93.70%
Mint.fun NFT minting on Zora Network:
Previous cost: $0.1476
Estimated cost: $0.0037
Decrease: 97.49%
Send USDC in Base:
Previous cost: $0.1758
Estimated cost: $0.0037
Decrease: 97.90%
NFT Revolution: Blobspace will revolutionize the NFT ecosystem by drastically reducing the gas costs associated with NFT activities on L2. This change paves the way for projects to pay all transaction costs for their users, similar to the approach around server costs in Web2 platforms.
Additionally, lower fees will facilitate the development of new applications and promote cross-integration within NFT application areas that were previously not feasible due to cost constraints, which will lead to an explosion of new NFT innovations over time.
“Cheaper, faster transactions are absolutely critical to continue to drive innovation and unlock nascent use cases like on-chain gaming and closed limit order book exchanges,” the Base team noted. “They will also make new ideas from the rapidly evolving fields of cryptography and AI more practical, leading to entirely new categories of applications in on-chain applications that haven’t even been conceived yet.”
Of course, in addition to cost savings, blobspace will also open up a new design space for NFTs, from storage use cases to creating "headless" NFT markets that exist entirely in blobs. So new models are just around the corner!
NFT Tasks: If you are like me, once L2 starts integrating with the Dencun upgrade, you will be keen to try out some of the applications in the ecosystem and see for yourself how much gas savings you can get. Some of the activities I plan to try include:
A collection of BasePaint daily open editions (Base)
Buying and selling friend.tech keys (Base)
Collect or issue NFTs on Mirror (Base, Linea, OP, Zora Network)
Create free coin airdrops on Zora (Arbitrum, Base, Blast, OP, Zora Network)
Minting popular NFTs on mint.fun (OP, Base, Zora Network)
