This blog dives into the intricacies of EigenDA, shedding light on how it operates and its potential to reshape the future of Ethereum. This development represents a strategic improvement with the capacity to impact the management of transactions and data on Ethereum, especially for rollups. For foundational context, read our overview of restaking on EigenLayer and our overview of Liquid Restaking Tokens. Overview of EigenDA

Developed by EigenLabs, EigenDA is a secure, high-throughput, and decentralized data availability (DA) service built on top of Ethereum using the EigenLayer restaking primitive. As the first actively validated service (AVS) within the EigenLayer network, EigenDA presents a new approach to managing stake delegation and validation tasks. EigenDA will enable restakers the ability to delegate their stake to node operators. These operators are tasked with validating transactions and data storage requests within the EigenDA network, in return for compensation derived from service payments. This mechanism ensures a mutually beneficial relationship between restakers and operators, fostering a secure and efficient validation process.

EigenDA’s Impact on Rollups

Furthermore, rollups leveraging EigenDA will benefit from significantly lower transaction costs and higher throughput, with the system's security and scalability designed to expand in tandem with the hardware advances of the node operator set. This innovative approach not only enhances transactional efficiency across the Ethereum ecosystem but also ensures a higher degree of secure composability within the EigenLayer ecosystem, setting a new benchmark for blockchain data storage and validation services. The more restakers and operators that participate, the stronger and more capable the system becomes. This scalability ensures that EigenDA can meet the demands of an ever-expanding Ethereum ecosystem without sacrificing speed or security.

Data Availability: A Technical Overview 

At a technical level, the need for DA solutions arises from the “Data Availability Problem.” The core issue being if a block publisher withholds part of a block's data (perhaps maliciously to withhold fraudulent block information) it can't be fully validated by any node, even if its transactions are theoretically correct. This undermines the blockchain's reliability, can expose cost-free Denial of Service (DoS) attack vectors to the chain and clients, and can disrupt processes like cross-chain swaps or data trading that depend on complete access to the block data.

The data today from any Layer 2 solution using Ethereum for data availability is stored in the smart contract's storage on Ethereum. However, it's not allocated to a specific "storage slot" in the traditional sense of individual Ethereum smart contract variables. Instead, the data is typically included as part of transaction calldata when submitting a batch of transactions (or “checkpoint”) to the smart contract. A checkpoint might contain the state root of the L2 chain at a specific block height, along with additional data necessary to assert the validity of the transactions up to that point. This additional data might include transaction information, state transitions, block headers, Merkle trees and roots, witness data, or other smart contract code or executions occurring on that L2.

All of this information costs significant amounts of gas to include as “CALLDATA” to Ethereum, and users of these L2 rollups can feel that pain. Despite the cheaper costs of off-chain execution, mitigating the current method of keeping L2 execution data available for a more affordable cost is a critical mission for the ecosystem.

The combined L1 + data availability throughput of Ethereum is a mere 83.33 KB/s, with a typical node bandwidth of 2 MB/s. Celestia supports a DA rate of 133 KB/s, with node bandwidth requirements up to 100 MB/s. EigenDA purports to support a data availability throughput of up to 10 MB/s, requiring nodes to manage 0.5MB/s of bandwidth. In practice, this would be over a 100x increase in throughput at four times less the operational cost, for blockchains plugging into EigenDA for their DA requirements.

The diagram above shows the basic flow of data through EigenDA.

Source: https://docs.eigenlayer.xyz/eigenda/overview#how-rollups-integrate 

Validation Cloud and EigenDA

Validation Cloud is proud to be supporting multiple protocols building on top of EigenLayer. The current list today includes Aethos, Supermeta, and Etherfi, with many more on the way. Future blog posts will highlight these protocols in further detail, and how users can delegate their stake to them via Validation Cloud’s AVS interfaces. Once live, you can navigate to our operator dashboard by searching for “Validation Cloud” on Mainnet via https://app.eigenlayer.xyz/operator, or Holesky Testnet via https://holesky.eigenlayer.xyz/operator

While staking is the foundation to secure a PoS network, operating Ethereum and EigenLayer infrastructure requires specific hardware and software which are expensive, tedious, and risky to maintain for non-technical users. Beyond the high operational costs, the staker must be well-versed with on-chain staking mechanisms. However, staking-as-a-service enables professional node operators, like Validation Cloud, to run these validators on  behalf of the staker. 

Platforms such as Validation Cloud are launching AVS staking-as-a-service and adhere to SOC 2 Type 2 standards, ensuring the highest levels of security, performance, and protection against slashing in staking operations. We handle the infrastructure, maintenance, upgrades, and operational risks so you don’t have to.

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About Validation Cloud

Validation Cloud is a Web3 data streaming and infrastructure company that connects organizations into Web3 through a fast, scalable, and intelligent platform. Headquartered in Zug, Switzerland, Validation Cloud offers highly performant and customizable products in staking, node, and data-as-a-service. Learn more at Validationcloud.io | LinkedIn | X