原文标题：Analyzing Blob Inclusion Rates and Market Strategies
Original author: 0xEvan
Original source: Mirror
Compiler: Lynn, Mars Finance
Special thanks to @sui414 for the audit, @ethpandaops for providing the mempool and beacon chain data, and @envio_indexer for the execution layer data.
summary
This article is a follow-up to EIP-4844's previous article and contains real-world data and insights from the emerging blob market, focusing on the blob publishing strategies being used by blob producers such as Optimism and Base, and providing quantitative analysis of policy efficiency metrics, such as the speed of the blob included in a certain epoch and paying a priority fee premium for that epoch inclusion rate.
Blob Marketplace utilization
As of April 16, a month after Dencun's upgrade, about 40% of blocks contained blobs. This number indicates that the market has not yet reached a saturation point, with average blob charges remaining at the minimum 1 wei mark due to falling below the target of an average of 3 blobs per block.
In the last week of March, the rise in the blob base fee briefly reversed the block base fee as blob briefly pushed the blob market to full capacity.
The current limit is around 400 blobs per hour. The market saturation of Ethereum data availability is around 900 blobs per hour to meet the goal of 3 blobs, which indicates that the market is currently around 40% capacity.
The 3 blob goal is 900 blobs per hour https://dune.com/hildobby/blobs
The Flashbots Blob-Block builder dashboard provides builder-level insights into blob data. Given that 40% of the blocks contain blobs, it's safe to assume that the builder should also have about 40% blob containment.
https://dune.com/queries/3522584/5923355
Currently, builders who make up 20% of the total block production have a lower-than-expected blob inclusion rate, ranging from 1% to 16%, suggesting that builders may be delayed in inclusion due to the lack of incentives we predicted in our previous article on EIP 4844.
Among the top 7 builders who account for 96% of Ethereum's block production, builders ranked 3rd and 7th by market share (20% combined) show a much lower concentration of blobs in their blocks. This suggests that they abandoned blob transactions when building block content due to a lack of financial incentives.
Blocks built by normal validators (which we define as validators that build their own blocks locally) have fewer MEV opportunities, so there are fewer precedents for economic competition in terms of inclusion and latency. These validators also don't typically run MEV-optimized code. Since these validators build their own blocks, there is no longer a timed game with blob propagation delays through relays. Most of the other top builders maintain similar blob inclusion rates to the average validator, which indicates a good will to adapt to the blob market. However, it remains to be seen whether this altruistic strategy will be effective during periods of intense MEV competition.
Optimistic and foundational blob policy insights
Currently, Optimism and Base use a blob maximization strategy - publish up to 6 blobs per transaction, effectively filling the blob space of that block with a single type 3 transaction. The advantage of committing 6 blobs per transaction is that you can minimize gas costs. The fee is paid only once, instead of paying the base fee of 6 transaction blocks for 6 blobs.
This strategy increases the blob gas by up to 12.5%, resulting in higher blob gas fees for the next block of blobs. If different rollups publish only 1 blob at a time and share a mempool with a transaction of 6 blob in size, depending on the gas cost of the blob, it may be more advantageous for the rollup to try to run the base blob transaction front-end and avoid a 12.5% blob fee increase. While the savings are negligible at the moment due to low blob contention, blob front running may be a viable strategy for future cost savings if the strategy holds. This also means that others who adopt this strategy may be subject to indefinite scrutiny of individual blob blocks submitted by other rollup or inscription users.
Base is currently the largest user in the blob market, followed by Arbitrum and Optimism. Overall, the strategies employed by Optimism and Base account for about half of the blob market utilization. We emphasize that the market is currently underutilized, so competition among market participants has not intensified.
https://dune.com/queries/3522241/5922814 - 4-hour time period (April 16, 2024)
Spot inclusion analysis
The effectiveness of the above blob publishing strategy can be measured by the slot inclusion rate and the correlation of the EIP-1559 priority fee premium to the slot inclusion rate.
The first measurement is the slot containment. This indicates the number of time slots required to include the blob in the beacon chain, with higher rates indicating slower inclusion times. The optimal slot inclusion rate is 1, which means it is contained within a single block. However, since blobs traverse the mempool slowly as very large transactions, we consider 2 slots to be an acceptable slot inclusion target.
The second measure is to understand the correlation between the EIP-1559 priority fee premium and the faster time slot inclusion rate. Ideally, a higher priority charge will result in a faster slot inclusion rate.
You can find aggregated, real-time dashboard data for all the blobs that have been adopted here. Note that the dashboard is not yet optimized and will take some time to load. The backend can be found in this repository and the frontend can be found in this repository.
Slot inclusion rate
Although the market is underutilized, blob inclusion for Optimism and Base is quite slow, as shown in the chart below, with frequent spikes above 2-slot inclusion rates. Initially, it seemed counterintuitive to have blob inclusion delays in markets that weren't running at full capacity.
The historical slot inclusion chart depicts delayed blob inclusion in an underutilized market, with a 2-slot inclusion rate as a benchmark as a reliable inclusion target.
EIP-1559 Correlation of the Priority Fee Premium with Slot Inclusion Rate
The optimistic and basic bid strategies follow Geth's specification of doubling all parameters when the blob is resubmitted. The chart below shows that this bidding strategy has no significant impact on faster slot inclusion, with priority fees as high as 40 Gwei to ensure inclusion of more than 10 slots, and priority fees as low as 2 Gwei, sometimes ensuring the inclusion of a single slot.
The blue dot is the individual preference fee bid premium and the green line is the median bid premium.
It's unclear what the best priority fee is for reliable slots to incorporate. In general, blobs are not good for stagnation in the mempool. Slower time period inclusion increases uncertainty about natural gas price differentials, rotating builder selection, and sporadic MEV opportunities.
Adoption and expansion of the blob marketplace
The blob market is still in its infancy, and its adoption is still ongoing - Scroll recently adopted EIP-4844 and zk rollups (such as Aztec and Taiko) with the goal of launching mainnet later this year. According to L2Beat, more rollups use Ethereum calldata as a data availability layer than blobs.
In addition, blobscription is designed to make it easier for non-aggregated users to access blobspaces through an easy-to-use front-end UI. After enabling the blob subscription, we saw that the blob marketplace quickly reached capacity, although activity has since waned.
After EIP-4844, the next major technical step in scaling blob usage is to achieve full danksharding after potentially increasing the target from 3. Implementing data availability sampling technology will expand the current blob market from 6 blobs to 64 and eventually to 256 blobs.
Blob market outlook
Blob producers looking for a reasonable slot inclusion rate are currently limited to using the EIP-1559 maximum priority charge, which is not a valid parameter as there is no significant correlation with faster blob inclusion rates. In addition, priority charges are slow to update because the entire blob needs to be recommitted to the memory pool. As blob adoption continues to increase, we anticipate that relying on this bidding mechanism will become more difficult due to increased bandwidth usage and slower inclusion feedback.
As the blob market matures, more complex bidding strategies are required to ensure on-demand access to the data availability tier. Primev is monitoring the blob market and is proposing blob pre-validation for mev-commit as a viable solution for reliable blob inclusion. If you are a blob producer or other Ethereum participant interested in optimizing blob inclusion, please contact our team to participate in our experiment.