How Proto-Danksharding Impacts Ethereum Consensus and Rollups

EIP-4844, also known as Proto-Danksharding, marks a major shift in Ethereum’s scalability roadmap, introducing temporary “blob” data storage and a new multidimensional fee market to reduce rollup data costs. While the upgrade significantly lowers posting fees for rollups, it also increases slot propagation sizes, raising potential risks for consensus stability and validator fairness. This study presents an in-depth empirical analysis of EIP-4844’s effects on synchronization times, rollup transaction patterns, user delays, and blob gas fee dynamics — offering insights that highlight both the upgrade’s benefits and its unintended challenges for Ethereum’s ecosystem.