Starknet Anticipates Significant Fee Reduction after Ethereum Dencun Upgrade

Reported by Cointelegraph, Layer-2 scaling protocol Starknet aims to double the impact of lowered costs for rollups after Ethereum’s latest hard fork, Dencun, takes effect on March 13.

The Starknet Foundation announced the rollout of additional fee-saving initiatives on its protocol that will coincide with the Dencun upgrade. The hard fork is arguably the most significant upgrade to Ethereum’s protocol since its shift to proof-of-stake consensus in October 2022.

Dencun includes Ethereum improvement proposal (EIP-4844), which changes how Ethereum rollups store data on mainnet. Several layer-2 rollups aggregate and process transactions off-chain and submit a summary proof of these transactions to the Ethereum blockchain.

EIP-4844 creates a new way for rollups to add cheaper data to blocks by introducing blob space as a replacement for using call data for storage. Using call data to store cryptographic proofs of off-chain bundled transactions has been historically expensive because all Ethereum nodes must process the data that lives on-chain indefinitely.

Proto-danksharding, named after the researchers who proposed EIP-4844, allows rollups to send and attach data blobs to blocks. The data is not accessible to the Ethereum Virtual Machine and is deleted automatically after a fixed period of 18 days.

Ecosystem developers anticipate that there might be a delay in the realization of the fee reductions by layer-2s in the coming weeks as rollups carry out governance and upgrade procedures to change their contracts — moving from pointing to call data to point to the new blob space.

The Starknet Foundation has announced a hard fork dedicated upgrade set to coincide with Dencun. Starknet version 0.13.1 will transition away from the “expensive” call data method for sending data to Ethereum to the more cost-effective “blobs” transaction type, significantly reducing fees.

The layer 2 expects to benefit significantly due to the fact that call data accounts for nearly 90% of the gas fees Starknet pays to post transactions to the Ethereum mainnet.