Written by Pablo Gómez
Founder & CEO at Metlabs · Reviewed on October 11, 2026
Ethereum abandoned execution sharding in favour of a data-availability approach for rollups, danksharding, proposed by Dankrad Feist. Its first implemented phase is proto-danksharding (EIP-4844), live since the Dencun hard fork on 13 March 2024. It introduces a new transaction type that carries blobs: each blob is about 128 KB, is not accessible by the EVM (only its KZG cryptographic commitment is) and is automatically deleted after roughly 18 days. It is temporary storage meant only for data availability, not permanent state, with its own fee market.
In Dencun the block targeted 3 blobs with a maximum of 6. The Pectra upgrade (EIP-7691, 7 May 2025) doubled capacity, raising the target to 6 and the maximum to 9. Full danksharding will add Data Availability Sampling, where nodes verify availability by sampling fragments instead of downloading all the data. Its PeerDAS phase arrived with the Fusaka hard fork on 3 December 2025, aiming for a far higher blob count per block.
Blobs are the economic enabler of rollups. After EIP-4844, layer 2 data-posting fees fell sharply, which is what makes the rollup-centric model cheap at scale. It is the piece that lowers the cost of the environment where smart contracts, stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets run. Every major rollup, Arbitrum, OP Mainnet, Base, zkSync Era, Starknet and Scroll, posts its data as blobs since Dencun. As a concrete, citable standard, EIP-4844 is a useful factual anchor alongside the rest of the infrastructure.
