25 posts tagged with "blobs"

The open 10-second branch of EIP-8198 says blob throughput stays unchanged per unit of wall-clock time. That is the intention. The integers refuse: the hard maximum falls from 105 to 102 blobs per minute, while the target rises from 70 to 72.

The arithmetic is small, but it changes real block packing. In the last 14 complete UTC days, 2,511 canonical Mainnet blocks carried more than the branch's proposed 17-blob cap. A shorter-slot chain gets more blocks in the same minute, so those blobs are not lost. The old block packing still has to change.

I asked Lighthouse for two blobs from one canonical Fulu block, listing commitment 6 before commitment 0. Every reachable Lighthouse supernode returned them as [6, 0]. That sounds like obedient filtering, but the Beacon API says the response follows the commitments in the block, so the correct order was [0, 6].

Blob transactions have an expensive way to say "same data, higher fee." The transaction hash changes, so the network pulls the whole thing again, including blob content it may already have.

EIP-8094 proposes splitting those pieces apart. I checked the premise against 14 complete days of mainnet mempool observations. Out of 3,427 consecutive same-sender, same-nonce blob fee increases, 3,413 kept the exact same versioned-hash array. That is 99.59%.

A higher-nonce blob transaction can reach every monitored observer before the transaction it must follow. I found 23 of those adjacent-nonce pairs across 14 complete mainnet days. In the slowest pair, the median lead for nonce N+1 was three minutes.

That is the awkward edge case behind EIP-8077. The draft would put sender and nonce into transaction announcements so a peer can spot a future nonce before it fetches the full transaction. All ten monitored observers saw the higher nonce first in only 23 of roughly 97,000 eligible pairs.

At slot start, Ethereum's blob pool did not look ready. Roughly 1.5 seconds later, it did.

Across eight fixed mainnet observers and 14 complete UTC days, 88.83% of canonical blob cell positions had been seen when the slot began. By the time the same observer saw its first PeerDAS data column, the share was 98.71%. The missing ten percentage points mostly arrived in the small gap before the block and its data turned up.

Base's July 28 incident said its safe head was delayed and batch submission was in partial outage. I expected a smaller version of the June chain-stall signature: the L1 batch sender going quiet. Instead, Base landed 260 canonical blob transactions carrying 1,554 blobs during the exact 2h02m status window, more than in either equal-length window beside it.

Arrival time has been my stand-in for PeerDAS bandwidth. It sort of worked, but it was still a timing proxy. A process-level counter now exposes bytes by port, so I expected a clean rising curve with blob count.

That curve exists. It is not remotely uniform.

Mostly empty blobs compress beautifully. PeerDAS's recovery half does not.

Xatu started preserving raw Gossipsub message payloads this morning. In the first two complete hours, I found 448 canonical blob blocks with all 128 column sidecars captured. For the 97 blocks below 25% blob fill, columns 64–127 used 4.42 times as many compressed payload bytes as columns 0–63. The same ratio was only 1.02x for blocks above 75% fill.

I called hundreds of thousands of engine_getBlobsV2 rows proof that some execution-client builds did not support the method. That was too clean. UNSUPPORTED was a label added by the collector, not a status returned by the execution client.

This corrects both The Blob Blindspot and engine_getBlobsV2 is still fragmented. The counts in those posts were real counts of rows carrying that label. The interpretation was wrong.

A seven-day freshness filter against Xatu's old blob_sidecar eventstream returned 598 rows. They looked recent only because their event timestamps were in 2033, 2034 and 2040. Every payload and database insertion belonged to July 3, 2025.

This is not Ethereum taking eight years to deliver a blob. Two contributor clocks briefly went feral.