DA War: A rising new narrative in the post-Cancun escalation era

After the Cancun upgrade, modular public chains may become the mainstream paradigm of public chains, and the DA layer will become the most competitive area in the modular stack, and the DA War will be in full swing.

Written by: NingNing

After Ethereum completes the Cancun upgrade in the first half of this year, Ethereum will complete the prototype (ProtoType) stage of transition from a single blockchain to a modular blockchain.

Ethereum after the Cancun upgrade can be seen to a certain extent as being composed of the Ethereum mainnet as L1 + Ethereum-based L2 (Arbitrum, Optimism, ZkSync, Starknet, Scroll, Taiko, Metis, etc.) Modular public chain system.

We can see the clues of this profound change from the slogan “Ethereum, scaled” of Optimism, which pursues complete equivalence with Ethereum.

The Ethereum stack after the Cancun upgrade will be explicitly divided into consensus layer, data availability layer, settlement layer and execution layer. Among them, part of the execution layer functions (Danksharding may be all) are outsourced to L2 based on Ethereum. The data availability layer ensures the rebuildability of L2, the settlement layer ensures the asset security of L2, and the consensus layer is responsible for finality.

DA (Data Availability) refers to the state data of L2 including Transaction Rollup to L1. After verification and consensus, it is stored in the L1 main network, providing fraud proof and ZK-Rollup for Op-Rollup L2. ZKP verification support.

The status data of L2 is now stored in the Ethereum mainnet block in the form of CallData. After the Cancun upgrade, L2 status data will be stored in the newly added Blob space.

At present, the gas fee consumed by L2 verification and clearing accounts for 10~20% of the gas consumption of the Ethereum main network. Among them, the DA service fee paid to the Ethereum main network accounts for 95% of the L2Gas fee consumption.

Before the mainnet of Celestia, a modular public chain focused on providing DA services, was launched, the Ethereum mainnet monopolized 100% of the DA market.

Celestia introduces DAS (Data Availability Sampling) and NMT (Namespace Merkle Tree) to enhance consensus security and scalability. DAS technology supports Celestia network light nodes to participate in the verification process of data availability. And NMT (namespace Merkle tree) reduces Celestia’s consensus load.

At the beginning of the launch of the Celestia mainnet, it began to compete head-on with the Ethereum mainnet in the DA market with its cheap, safe, and highly trustworthy features, including privacy L2 Manta, decentralized option protocol Lyra’s Dapp Chain, and Celestia’s many ecological partners. Such as Dymension, etc., and fell into the arms of Celestia.

Celestia’s approach made the Ethereum community and Vitalik very unhappy, which eventually led L2Beat to remove L2 based on Celestia DA from the L2 list.

This is not entirely because Celestia’s competition damages the value capture ability of the Ethereum main network, but more because its behavior damages the coupling, equivalence and interoperability between Ethereum and L2.

But Celestia is not the only one who is eyeing the DA market. EigenLayer, which invented the new restaking primitive, also urgently needs an AVS (Active Verification Service) instance to find real scenarios for the platform’s $1 billion TVL.

Faced with the temptation of DA services in this blue ocean market, EigenLayer chose to launch EigenDA as the first AVS instance without hesitation.

It’s just that the architecture of EigenDA is different from Celestia. It uses ZK technology such as KZG commitment to verify the state data submitted by L2 + the EigenDA network, which ensures consensus security by Restaking ETH, is responsible for the finality. In the end, L2’s state data still needs to be submitted and saved. to the Ethereum mainnet.

EigenDA is equivalent to a subcontractor for verification and finality in the DA service of the Ethereum main network, rather than a competitor like Celestia.

In addition to Ethereum, Celestia and EigenDA, there is another player in the DA market that has been ignored by everyone: Covalent.

We know that after the Cancun upgrade, the Ethereum mainnet will only save the status data submitted by L2 for 1 month, and then discard it. In order to maintain the decentralization of the network and the establishment of the DAS light node mechanism, Celestia will also regularly discard the status data submitted by L2.

As a professional on-chain data platform endorsed by giants such as Binance, Coinbase, CoinGecko, etc., Covalent launched the long-term DA service EWM (Ethereum Time Shuttle Machine) at the end of last year to permanently save the status data submitted by L2 discarded by Ethereum.

Moreover, Covalent will index and structure these data and integrate them into the on-chain data API service of its platform to provide services and support for professional blockchain data websites, government regulatory departments, and artificial intelligence research teams.

The picture above is a modular stack diagram produced by the Cavalent team. L2 projects Arbitrum, Optimism, Scroll, etc. are responsible for writing status data. Ethereum is responsible for asset custody and settlement. The consensus layer has Ethereum and Celestia competing, while the DA layer is Ethereum. , Celestia and EigenLayer’s Three Kingdoms Kill, Covalent is responsible for reading L2 status data.

I personally believe that after the Cancun upgrade, the modular public chain will become the mainstream paradigm of the public chain, and the DA layer will become the most competitive area in the modular stack, and the DA War will be in full swing. The protocols in the modular stack will become a major investment mainline in 24 years.