The Ethereum blockchain’s last testnet was created in the middle of February, and the Dencun update is currently live on the majority of mainnets. The Ethereum network and all reliant layer-2 systems will now be improved by Dencun. Transactions are now essentially cost-free thanks to Ethereum’s incorporation of EIP-4844’s new transaction type, which allows “blobs” of data to be momentarily stored in the beacon node.
This technique, which improves network scalability, is known technically as proto-dank sharding. By enabling the insertion of large data packets, or blobs, as in Ethereum transactions, it lowers the cost of roll-up transactions. These blobs, however, are transient and should not be kept in storage for longer than eighteen days without trimming.
Blobs are ephemeral by design, which makes sense considering that they guarantee rollup performance and efficiency by storing an exponential amount of blob data on Layer 1. While disappearing blobs increase the layer-2 network’s efficiency, they also make it more difficult to save historical records, which is often required for network developers. To address these issues, The Graph provides a workable method for protecting the blobs, ensuring their continued availability, and advancing Ethereum‘s Danksharding initiative.
A joint solution for indexing and storing binary data has been developed by developers from StreamingFast, Pinax, and The Graph. Firehose and Substreams are two key technologies that when combined allow for quick and scalable data extraction.
The Consensus Layer, or consensus clients, is where blob data is stored, so The Graph Network has developed a new Firehose that is compatible with the Beacon Node. This effectively demonstrates how to quickly create a new Firehose for any given chain by utilizing the novel poller-based technique that depends on a single Ethereum Blobs Substream.
Through the gRPC API, these substreams make it possible to discreetly and easily retrieve data from Beacon Chain Substreams that are Firehose-enabled. The second method is the Blobs Substreams-powered Firehose, which uses The Graph Network’s GraphQL API to obtain data from a subgraph powered by Substreams.
As the demand for data in Web3 continues to expand, The Graph maintains an all-encompassing vision by including additional data services and query languages, guaranteeing that the system is well-equipped for any use cases, now and in the foreseeable future.
