Since the first release of the white paper in 2013, Ethereum has gone through nine years. During this long and glorious time, Ethereum has successfully experienced 11 major upgrades, each injecting new narratives and opportunities into its ecosystem. In the current Senerity phase (Ethereum 2.0), founder Vitalik Buterin plans to complete the upgrade roadmap in six stages, with the main directions of these upgrades being scalability, enhanced security, consensus mechanisms, and optimization of the economic model. According to the Ethereum roadmap released by Vitalik Buterin, the Dencun upgrade is part of “The Surge” in the Ethereum upgrade roadmap.
The Surge
The Surge phase is mainly aimed at solving the long-standing scalability issues, with the goal of eventually achieving Ethereum’s performance level to 100,000 TPS, approaching the speed of traditional electronic payments. This upgrade is achieved through Danksharding (“DS”, i.e., sharding). This is also the focus of this article, the planned Kankun upgrade to be carried out this year.
What is the Kankun upgrade?
The Kankun upgrade is an important upgrade of Ethereum, designed to increase data storage and reduce costs. The Kankun upgrade consists of five EIPs, with the most market-focused being EIP-4844, which aims to address Ethereum’s scalability issues and help reduce transaction costs of Ethereum Layer2 solutions, directly benefiting related ecosystems like L2. In addition to the core EIP-4844, other improvement proposals include EIP-1153, EIP-4788, EIP-5656, EIP-6780.
On January 17 and January 30, 2024, Ethereum began conducting Kankun upgrade tests on the Goerli and Sepolia test networks. The test networks are currently operating normally, with a normal number of Blob submissions. Next, there will be follow-up tests for Holesky on February 7, and the mainnet implementation date has not been announced.
EIP-4844 (Proto-Danksharding)
Currently, all transaction data of Ethereum Layer 2 is stored in the Calldata of Layer 1. However, the Calldata space is limited and cannot meet the growing storage needs, leading to high data usage costs and increased computational burden on Ethereum nodes. The Kankun upgrade will introduce Blob, a new data storage structure introduced by EIP-4844, specifically designed to store transaction data submitted from Layer 2 to Layer 1. Blob is stored on the consensus layer separately from Calldata, which cannot be accessed by the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). The role of Blob is to allow the stored data to be accessed and verified by the demand side within a certain period (automatically deleted within about a month) without the need for Layer 1 to execute everything, greatly reducing the node burden.
Source: https://hackmd.io/@luozhu/SyleCcpti
Currently, the size of a Blob is fixed at 128 KB, so a single Rollup can only purchase the entire Blob directly, without the ability to purchase a portion of the data as needed. Overall, attaching six complete Blobs to a block will increase the block size by about 40%, considering that the current block size is approximately 1.875 MB, and a complete Blob set may increase by about 0.75 MB. This increase occurs in an 18-day rolling cycle, so network nodes will not increase their long-term storage capacity.
New precompiled Point Evaluation Precompile
In addition, EIP-4844 also introduces a new precompiled called Point Evaluation Precompile, which allows Optimistic rollup and ZK rollup to easily verify data involving Blobs during execution. In Optimistic rollup, the main purpose of Point Evaluation Precompile is to verify the underlying data provided when submitting fraud proofs. In ZK rollup, Point Evaluation Precompile is mainly used to verify two critical commitments, namely Blob commitments and ZK rollup itself commitments. By utilizing Point Evaluation Precompile, ZK rollups can effectively prove that these two commitments point to the same data, ensuring data consistency and providing reliability and security guarantees for the entire ZK rollup system.
EIP-1153 (Instant storage opcode)
Currently, all data storage on Ethereum follows a permanent storage model, including storing temporary data, resulting in waste and consuming a large amount of Gas fees. EIP-1153 aims to bring a new mechanism for handling temporary or instant storage during smart contract execution. The introduction of instant storage opcodes allows smart contracts to use instant storage, where smart contracts can read and call temporary storage data during a complete transaction execution cycle, and clear the temporary data directly after the transaction execution cycle ends.
EIP-4788 (Beacon block root submission)
Currently, the Ethereum Virtual Machine EVM (Ethereum execution layer) and Beacon chain (Ethereum consensus layer) being mutually independent poses some challenges. The EVM cannot directly access the Beacon chain and can only obtain data and status on the Beacon chain through external trusted oracles, which introduces risks such as oracle failures and malicious manipulation. EIP-4788 will place a Beacon chain block root on each execution block header, allowing the EVM to directly obtain the status and data of the Ethereum consensus layer. This is equivalent to introducing a protocol-level oracle, improving operational efficiency and accuracy, and eliminating risks associated with external oracles.
EIP-5656 (MCOPY opcode)
EIP-5656 introduces the MCOPY opcode to optimize the process of copying memory data during smart contract execution. Memory copy refers to the process of moving data from one location in memory to another, which is a fundamental operation used in computing to construct data structures and copy objects. The adoption of the MCOPY opcode will reduce the Gas fees related to relevant operations and improve the performance of contract execution.
EIP-6780 (Limit SELFDESTRUCT self-destruct)
As the name suggests, the existing SELFDESTRUCT self-destruct opcode allows developers to completely remove smart contracts from the blockchain using this opcode. Upon completion of execution, the contract’s code and storage are removed from Ethereum, and any remaining ETH in the contract is sent to a specified address. This operation involves a significant amount of changes to the account’s state, as it involves removing deployed contract code and storage data from the chain. EIP-6780 aims to restrict the use of the SELFDESTRUCT opcode. It will only take effect when creating a smart contract and executing the SELFDESTRUCT opcode in the same transaction. In other cases, there will be no code or storage deletion.
Conclusion
As a pioneer in blockchain technology, Ethereum has been continuously pushing for updates and upgrades to meet the growing business needs and user expectations. The current Kankun upgrade is an important step for Ethereum on the roadmap of scalability and performance improvement. With the implementation of the Kankun upgrade, Ethereum has made significant progress in security, scalability, and sustainability, laying a solid foundation for broader blockchain applications in the future. This article is provided by the official source and does not represent the position or investment advice of this site. Readers must conduct their own careful evaluation.