Danksharding
Danksharding is the full sharding roadmap for Ethereum data availability, designed to scale the network to millions of transactions per second by partitioning block data across shards and using data availability sampling so that every node verifies data availability without downloading every byte, ultimately enabling Ethereum to serve as a high-throughput data availability layer for thousands of rollups.
Sharding has been part of Ethereum's scalability roadmap since the early design period, but the original sharding vision — where different shards execute different transactions — was abandoned in favor of a rollup-centric roadmap. Danksharding, named after researcher Dankrad Feist who played a key role in its design, is the refined version: rather than sharding execution, Ethereum shards data availability, allowing the network to provide massive amounts of cheap blob space for rollups without requiring every node to process every byte of data.
The full Danksharding design targets 64 shards, each carrying one blob per slot, for a total of 64 blobs per 12-second Ethereum slot — versus six blobs per slot in the current Proto-Danksharding implementation. This would multiply available blob space by roughly 10x over EIP-4844, dramatically expanding throughput capacity for rollups.
The cryptographic mechanism enabling Danksharding is data availability sampling (DAS). In DAS, each node does not download every blob in its entirety. Instead, nodes download small random samples of each blob. Using erasure coding — where each blob is mathematically expanded so that any 50% of the chunks are sufficient to reconstruct the whole — nodes can verify with overwhelmingly high statistical probability that the full blob was published, even from a small sample. This allows light nodes with minimal hardware to participate in DA verification.
Danksharding also requires distributed block building, since the full set of 64 blobs per slot would be too large for a single validator to propose naively. The design incorporates a two-phase propose-and-reveal mechanism where proposers commit to blob availability before revealing full content, combined with MEV-Boost-style proposer-builder separation to ensure that constructing large blobs does not centralize the validator role.
Implementing full Danksharding requires several Ethereum upgrades beyond Dencun: a peer-to-peer DAS networking layer, a full KZG ceremony result deployment (already completed in early 2023 with tens of thousands of participants), and modifications to the fork choice rule. The full Danksharding upgrade is expected to be among the more complex and consequential changes to Ethereum in its post-Merge history.