Ethereum's Blop Mechanism
Introduction |
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Layer 1 blockchains, as pioneers in the blockchain world, have shortcomings which has called for improvement over the years, amongst developers and the blockchain community.
The era of smart contracts began with Ethereum, as it's dubbed the father of smart contracts. Despite its many innovations, its shortcomings have been clamouring for solutions over the years.
The Bitcoin blockchain, which began the era of blockchain as the technology behind cryptocurrency, also has a lot of shortcomings like longer block time, enormous resource consumption, less transaction throughput, and so on.
In the case of Bitcoin blockchain, it's shortcomings have led to hard forks in the past due to a divided community and innovations such as scaling solutions like the lightning network, which has significantly increased transaction throughput on-chain and off-chain.
As for Ethereum, one of its greatest shortcomings is the high gas fee, which has now been suppressed drastically over the past few months. One of the remarkable solutions to the earlier-mentioned problem with the Ether Chain is the Blop mechanism from the Ethereum Improvement Proposal, EIP-4884.
What is the Blop's Mechanism? |
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Blop is the Dencun upgrade under the EIP-4884 aimed at improving the scalability of the Ether chain through L2 solutions. Blop involves breaking down of transaction data into segments on the Ether chain and a temporary data storage to be eliminate congestion on the chain, hence, improving gas fee.
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Blop upgrade enables L2s (Layer 2 solutions) have access to data stored temporarily to process transaction on the L2 protocols, thereby reducing the strain on Ethereum chain due to ever increasing community's utilization of the L1.
Blop space works a bit identically to the Lightning Network, Bitcoin's scaling solution where transactions are bundled off the Bitcoin chain and carried out on the lightning network, significantly reducing the waiting time to get transactions through and low cost of transaction. This somehow has an indirect impact on the Ether token which reached its all-time-high days ago.
In the case of Ethereum's Blop space, data utilized by the L2s are stored for some time on the Ether chain, unlike Bitcoin's lightning network which only bundles the funding from and to, to the Bitcoin chain while other transaction data has no traces on the main chain.
The effect of Ethereum's Blop mechanism have been immense since the upgrade, Ether chain has now become an affordable one for everyone, the story was something else years back. Truly, the blockchain world is growing at a remarkable pace.
Key highlights of how Blop mechanism works |
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Blop improves the scalability of the ethereum blockchain through temporary data storage that are utilized by L2s thereby reducing the strain on the main chain.
The data storage on Blop is for 18 days on the nodes at the moment before it's deleted to free more space on the main chain. Noting that each Blop node can hold up to 128KB of data.
Blop significantly reduces the gas fee on transactions as it enables L2s to process transactions cheaply without needing the calldata of the main chain that is more expensive.
Blop drives competition amongst L2s which further eliminates excessive strain on the main Ether chain.
Blop mechanism is indeed a game changer which has aided up to 90% reduction in gas fee on the Etheruem blockchain, making the blockchain to be more scalable and driving more adoption for the Ether chain.
Blop is undoubtedly a game changer but that's not the end, its shortcomings may be there to be addressed with upgrades in the few months/years.
