Original author: Terry

Legitimacy, a word that literally contradicts the spirit of Web3, has recently begun to appear more and more frequently in everyones field of vision.

In particular, there has been a big discussion in the crypto community about the legitimacy of Ethereum DA, involving many current star projects such as EigenLayer and Celestia. Even Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has begun to speak out frequently. So what exactly is DA? What does its legitimacy debate actually mean?

What is DA?

DA, which stands for data availability, is an important part of todays modular blockchain architecture.

Unlike a single blockchain, a modular blockchain splits different parts of a blockchain network into corresponding functional layers, such as execution, data availability and consensus, settlement ( settlement):

Comparison between single chain and modular blockchain, Picture Source Network

• Execution: The execution layer responsible for processing transactions and status updates;

• Data availability (DA layer): Responsible for storing the data required to verify the validity of transactions;

• Consensus: Responsible for determining the ordering and final confirmation of transactions within the block, that is, determining the order in which transactions in the memory pool are included in which block;

• Settlement: Responsible for verifying Rollup L2 status data and processing fraud certificates/validity certificates;

As the L2 war heats up and the modular narrative continues to develop, projects such as Rollup, which focuses on execution, or Celestia, which focuses on data availability, are emerging one after another.

In a modular world, the core function of data availability (DA) is to ensure that on-chain data is available and accessible to all network participants to reduce costs and expand the blockchain.

What are the benefits of this?

First of all, it is naturally more professional. Taking the separation of data availability and execution as an example, in a modular architecture, one group of nodes can be completely responsible for DA, while another group (or multiple groups) of nodes are responsible for execution, and everyone performs their own duties. . In this context, a dedicated DA layer can improve interoperability and reduce costs in addition to achieving higher throughput.

Because in theory, every node in the blockchain network must download all transaction data to verify that the data is available. This is an extremely inefficient and costly task, but it is also the way most blockchains currently work. , is also a barrier to scalability, as the amount of data required for verification increases linearly with block size.

The second is to greatly improve the scalability, making each blockchain a Lego brick. Developers can build more scalable blockchains by combining specialized modular chains, through Caldera, AltLayer and Conduit Rollup-as-a-service providers are making it increasingly easier to deploy new L2s.

So to put it bluntly, taking the modularization of Ethereum as an example, it uses the L1 main chain as the settlement and data availability layer, and uses various Rollup and other L2 solutions as the execution layer to achieve expansion.

This is also Ethereum’s roadmap towards a modular blockchain stack, and once this transition is complete, users will be able to use L2 solutions while still benefiting from the security of Ethereum’s base layer.

DA legitimacy debate

So why is there a big discussion about DA in Vitalik and the community recently? Whats the reason for everyones controversy?

Quite simply, in addition to Ethereum (that is, directly submitting state data and proofs to Ethereum L1), the current mainstream projects in the data availability layer have also emerged new solutions such as Celesita, EigenLayer and Avail.

With the development of Celestia, with its scalability, sovereignty, flexibility, shared security and other features, it competes with Ethereum in terms of data availability layer, and attracts some general Rollup L2 such as Manta, ZkFair, etc. Featuring Celestia.

The most direct impact is the broken window effect of Manta Pacific migrating the data availability layer from Ethereum to Celestia. This is also the first L2 based on Celestia, which has triggered extensive discussion and attention in the Ethereum community.

For Manta Pacific, the motivation for doing so is undoubtedly to reduce data availability costs - according to official disclosures, since migrating the DA layer to Celestia, compared to using the Ethereum main network, the cost has been reduced by 99.81%, which is an exponential decrease.

Of course, compared to Rollup, which uses Ethereum as the DA layer, third-party DA solutions like Celestia must sacrifice a certain amount of security. However, for these L2 trade-offs, which DA to choose is related to cost and security. , but the impact of cost is undoubtedly more critical.

Therefore, new projects such as Aleo, Dymension, and ZKFair are currently investing in new DA solutions such as Celestia to reduce costs. Even Polygon has chosen to switch to NEAR, saying bluntly that it is 8000 times cheaper than Ethereum.

Translation: 8000 times cheaper than Ethereum!

Im wondering how this compares to other DA solutions like Celestia?

It is foreseeable that as long as the cost advantage persists, more and more L2 solutions will be integrated with new DA solutions such as Celestia in the future. This will have a big impact on Ethereum, especially the Ethereum community and the The Celesita team fights for the right to define Ethereum L2.

Therefore, the big debate on DA legitimacy is, in short, a debate on the universal Rollup L2 to replace the DA layer from Ethereum to modular blockchain DA such as Celesita and Avail.

The hidden line behind the development of DA track

Overall, the proliferation of related DA solutions such as Celestia has indeed weakened the competitiveness of Ethereum DA to a certain extent.

Specifically, Celestia is not the only one that has impacted the legitimacy of Ethereum. If we classify the current DA track from a macro perspective (excluding centralized solutions), it can be roughly divided into four categories:

• Ethereum blob/Danksharding;

• Independent decentralized DA such as Celestia;

• EigenDA/MantleDA (DA using ETH restaking);

• Rookies like NEAR;

Needless to say, Celestia is regarded by many community users as a rigid necessity that brings huge economic benefits to L2 Gas costs.

In particular, Ethereum projects such as Manta, ZKFair, Arbitrum Orbit, general L2 Eclipse, decentralized API data service protocol Pocket Network, and modular blockchain network Movement Labs are all using Celestia.

Once the scale effect is formed, it may indeed continue to erode Ethereums fee income, grow into a specialized DA giant, and obtain extremely high valuation premiums (share of Ethereums loss).

In addition, EigenDA makes full use of the existing infrastructure of Ethereum, relies on Ethereum, and extends the security consensus of Ethereum through restaking. Therefore, it is essentially maintaining the legitimacy of Ethereum DA and enhancing Ethereum. The workshop’s DA ability.

NEAR is also a new seed player entering the game. In addition to the Polygon mentioned above, Arbitrum Orbit has also integrated Near DA, allowing developers to launch their own configurable rollups based on Arbitrums technology.

Overall, in fact, from the soaring market price of TIA, we can also see that the DA track has gradually entered everyones mainstream vision with the evolution of the new pattern of L12.

From this perspective, the game about DAs legitimacy will also become a main narrative in 2024, and even evolve a new Ethereum killer. As for what new projects can emerge, let us wait and see.