Cancun Upgrade: Starting the next revolution in Ethereum NFT

Author: William M. Peaster, Bankless

It’s not every day that the world’s large blockchain projects undergo major evolutions.

That's why now All eyes are on Ethereum as the leading smart contract platform is set to receive a major upgrade that will introduce an unprecedented mechanism: Blobspace.

blobs on Ethereum The arrival of NFT will usher in the first golden age of L2 scaling solutions, which in turn will set off a revolution in how builders and users deal with NFT.

In today’s article , let's take a quick review of EIP-4844 and blobspace and some points to watch for going forward.

is EIP-4844 Prepare for Blobspace NFT

101: Cancun-Deneb to be deployed on Ethereum on March 13, 2024 ( Also known as Dencun) hard fork upgrade heralds that the Ethereum network will enter the Surge era aimed at doubling its scalability.

The core of Dencun is Introducing EIP-4844, which will enable native forks, known as blobspaces, a breakthrough innovation designed to help Ethereum's L2 ecosystem move toward 100,000 transactions per second (TPS).

Why it matters: Blobspace is poised to revolutionize the Ethereum ecosystem by drastically reducing gas fees. This reduction in gas fees is particularly important for Ethereum L2 solutions and will make 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 adopts a pricing mechanism that is independent of the Ethereum main Gas market, namely "blob gas".

Blobs are created by splitting data into smaller pieces and then mathematically converting those pieces into unique identifiers that can be stored and later retrieved. This process not only optimizes data storage on the blockchain, but also ensures transactions are processed faster and more cost-effectively.

What happens next What? As the Dencun upgrade is implemented, Ethereum L2 will need to manually integrate this new technology to reap the benefits. For example, Optimism plans to launch the Ecotone upgrade as soon as Dencun is deployed, implementing blobspace in its Superchain ecosystem (such as Optimism, Base, Zora Network, etc.).

Although different in all It may take several months to complete the integration work on the L2 platform, but the overall expectation is for rapid adoption across the entire Ethereum ecosystem, ushering in a new era of efficiency and scalability for the leading smart contract network.

Estimated savings : The Optimism community developed the "Superchain Savings Estimator", a tool designed to estimate how much the Gas cost of Optimism Superchain L2 may be reduced after adopting blobspace.

With this tool, examples such as exchanging on Uniswap on Base or minting Zora NFTs on Zora have shown significant reductions in transaction fees - in some cases, as much as 98 %. Based on Superchain’s recent average transaction assumptions, some clear examples are as follows:

Uniswap exchange on Base:

Previous cost: $0.5822

Estimated cost: $0.0106

Reduction: 98.18%

Zora Minting NFT on Zora Network:

Previous cost: $0.3013

Estimated cost: $0.0061

Reduction: 97.98%

Minding Mirror NFT at Optimism:

Previous cost: $0.2032

< span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 18px;">Estimated cost: $0.0128 USD

Decrease: 93.70%

Mint.fun NFT Minting on Zora Network:

Previous cost: $0.1476

Estimated cost: $0.0037 USD

Reduction: 97.49%

Send USDC in Base:

Previous cost: $0.1758

Estimated cost: $0.0037 USD

Reduction: 97.90%

NFT revolution: Blobspace will significantly reduce the costs related to NFT activities on L2 Gas cost, thus completely changing the NFT ecosystem. This change paves the way for projects to pay all transaction costs for their users, similar to what is done in Web2 platforms around server costs.

Also, lower The fee will promote the development of new applications and promote cross-integration within NFT application fields, which was previously unfeasible due to cost constraints. Over time, this will lead to an explosion of new NFT innovation.

"Cheaper, Faster transactions are absolutely critical to continue driving innovation and unlocking nascent use cases, such as 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 artificial intelligence more practical, thereby developing entirely new application categories in on-chain applications that have not even been conceived." p>

Of course, in addition to cost savings, blobspace will also NFT opens up a new design space, from storage use cases to creating "headless" NFT marketplaces that exist entirely in blobs. So, a new model is just around the corner!

NFT task: If If you're like me, once L2 starts integrating with the Dencun upgrade, you'll be keen to try out some of the apps in the ecosystem and see for yourself how much gas you can save. Some activities I plan to try include:

Collect a BasePaint daily open version (Base)

Buy and sell friend.tech keys (Base)

Collect or publish NFTs on Mirror (Base, Linea, OP, Zora Network)

Create a free minting airdrop on Zora (Arbitrum, Base, Blast, OP, Zora Network)< /span>

on mint.fun Minting popular NFTs (OP, Base, Zora Network)