As the good weather and Spring is starting to be felt on the upper hemisphere, finally the crypto markets are seeing an All Time High (ATH) - well, at least for Bitcoin! Ethereum you’re up next. Unfortunately, macroeconomic fears of further sticky inflation that could delay US’s rate cuts, have trickled down to our little corner ending the month with sustained sells which lead to believe we are in for a bit of a crab market.
Notwithstanding, protocols are finally starting to gear up to their Token Generation Event (TGE) given the somewhat green market conditions coupled with the steady stablecoin inflows the bullish overall market sentiment is more than definitely here to stay!
Total Crypto Market Cap: $2.44T (+41.37%)
DeFi TVL: $96.09B (+52.92%)
Stablecoins: $141.221B (+4.45%)
During the first half of March. Ethereum achieved a major milestone with the Dencun upgrade reviewed on January Edition - A Greater Sum, and finally introduced Proto-Danksharding through EIP-4844.
EIP-4844: Shard Blob Transactions
**EIP-4844 expands the data availability capabilities** of Ethereum with the introduction of new type of transactions (type 3 transactions) called a Blob (Binary Large Object). A blob-carrying transaction is like a regular transaction, but enhanced with blob data, KZG commitments, and proofs. Blobs are extremely large (~125 kB) compared to standard Ethereum transactions and are much cheaper than the equivalent amount of calldata. Whereas calldata is priced at 16 gas per non-zero byte and can have variable size, blob data is priced at 1.04 gas per byte and has a fixed size of 131,072 gas, resulting in significant cost reductions for L2 transactions.
Figure 1 - L1 vs L2 Data Cost Comparison.
Figure 2 - New Type 3 Transaction.