What is EIP-4844?
- Author
- CRYPTO PORT Editorial
- Published
- Updated
- Reading time
- 6 min
In short
EIP-4844 added blobs — a temporary data area — to Ethereum, and went live with the Dencun upgrade in March 2024. Before it, rollups posted their data as calldata and spent most of their cost there. Blobs have their own fee market and are discarded after a retention period.
Key points
- The standard that introduced blob data to Ethereum
- Activated in the Dencun upgrade of March 2024
- Created a blob fee market separate from ordinary gas
- Blob data is not permanent and is pruned after a period
Definition
An Ethereum improvement proposal that introduced a temporary data area (blobs) together with a dedicated fee market. It is also known as proto-danksharding.
Before EIP-4844, rollups wrote their transaction data to layer 1 as ordinary calldata. Calldata lives in the area every node keeps permanently, and it competes for gas in the same market as execution. Data posting made up most of a rollup's operating cost, and user fees tracked it closely.
The proposal starts from the observation that what rollups need is proof the data was published, not that it be stored forever. Blobs are therefore held outside the execution layer and retained only for a set window before being pruned. Giving up permanence is what makes the space cheaper per byte.
Pricing works much like EIP-1559: the blob fee rises when blob usage in a block exceeds the target and falls when it is under. Because this is a separate budget from execution gas, blob space can be cheap while ordinary transactions are congested — and when blobs fill up, rollup fees alone can climb.
Watch out for
- · When blob space is congested, L2 fees can move several-fold — they are not permanently cheap
- · Blob data is deleted after its window, so retrieving old history depends on separate services
- · Each rollup structures its fees differently, so a cost reduction does not automatically reach users