What Is the Surge (Ethereum)?
The Ethereum Surge is a development stage of the Ethereum network.
It includes a set of upgrades, most notably sharding—the Ethereum roadmap targets partitioning the Ethereum network into 64 shard chains.
Execution will be split across these chains, increasing throughput by allowing parallel computation. Each shard chain will have its own set of validators.
Moreover, the network will scale by outsourcing transaction execution to layer-2 blockchains.
Since transaction costs are cheaper on many layer-2 chains, the Ethereum mainnet will be focused on consensus, settlement, and data availability, while layer-2 chains will provide the execution layer.
Scaling Ethereum’s Network
Rollups currently use calldata for storage when posting their state roots back to the mainnet.
Although calldata is Ethereum’s cheapest form of storage, it is still comparatively expensive, considering the data passes the EVM and is permanently recorded on the blockchain.
However, rollups do not need permanent data storage.
It is sufficient if data is temporarily available and guaranteed not to be withheld or censored by a malicious actor.
That is why calldata is not optimized for rollups and is not scalable enough for their data availability needs.
Danksharding
On the other hand, Ethereum’s plan to institute Danksharding can achieve meaningful scaling benefits more quickly.
Specifically, the Surge will introduce Proto-Danksharding with EIP-4844, a new type called a Blob-carrying transaction.
These transactions resemble regular transactions but provide data availability guarantees in a blob while at the same time not committing to permanent data storage.
Rollups can interpret more data, as blobs are 125 kilobytes big, much bigger than the average Ethereum block.
Summary
The Ethereum Surge focuses on scaling and improving the network’s transaction throughput. It also leverages the strengths of rollups for layer-2 scalability.
Sharding is no longer a scaling solution for the Ethereum base layer but prioritizes making data availability cheaper.
Ideally, danksharding could even invert the blockchain trilemma by enabling a highly decentralized set of validators to shard data into smaller pieces and preserve its availability guarantees.
This would increase scalability without giving up security.