Starknet anticipates significant impact from Ethereum’s Dencun hard fork

Ethereum’s Dencun hard fork includes EIP-4844, an upgrade that reduces the costs of layer-2 rollups.

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.

Related: Make Ethereum cheap again: ‘Blobs’ to be launched via Dencun upgrade on March 13

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.

Polygon Labs’ vice president of product, David Silverman, previously told Cointelegraph that the blog space is drastically cheaper for rollups and provides the same security guarantees.

Starknet expects immediate reduction in fees

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.

Related: More TPS, less gas: Ethereum L2 Starknet outlines performance upgrades

StarkWare product manager and blockchain researcher Ilia Volokh tells Cointelegraph that Starknet’s shared prover (SHARP), which sends Starknet’s state diffs to Ethereum as call data, will shift to blob space. State diffs contain information about every contract storage that was updated and additional information on contract deployments.

Volokh expects to see accurate statistics reflecting fee reduction within an hour of Dencun’s implementation. Meanwhile, the full benefits will be immediately reflected to users, Volokh said:

“A byte of data will be priced in accordance with Ethereum’s blob prices.”

Starknet’s SHARP prover makes use of recursive proof technology that essentially bundles previous proofs into batches called trains. A new hash system introduced in early 2024 will allow the trains to increase the amount of transactions they can carry and ramp up the protocol’s efficiency.