Manta Pacific has officially begun integrating with Celestia, migrating its data availability layer (DA layer) from Ethereum to Celestia.

Manta Pacific Integration

Why Are Ethereum Gas Fees So High and How Can They Be Reduced?

To understand why Ethereum gas fees are high, imagine Ethereum as a central kitchen and Layer 2 (L2) solutions as franchise stores. When users transact on L2 solutions, the transaction data must be submitted to Ethereum, the central kitchen. As more users transact, the central kitchen gets overwhelmed with orders, necessitating higher fees for prioritization.

Ethereum must ensure the validity and availability of transaction data and maintain the state and balance of all users, leading to high gas fees. If some functions, like data availability, are offloaded to a specialized service, fees could be significantly reduced.

How Celestia Helps Manta Pacific Achieve Solana-Level Gas Fees

By offloading data availability to Celestia, Manta Pacific can avoid competing for Ethereum's limited resources, thus reducing gas fees. Celestia, as a dedicated data availability layer, can handle this function more efficiently.

According to IOBC Capital, Ethereum gas fees are composed of:

  1. Execution fees (for nodes to execute and verify transactions)

  2. Storage/state fees (for updating the state)

  3. Data availability fees (for publishing data to L1)

Data availability fees are the largest component. By moving data availability to Celestia, users no longer compete for Ethereum's resources, effectively lowering gas fees.

Technical Details: Understanding Celestia's Mechanisms

Blockchain layers are typically divided into:

  1. Consensus layer

  2. Settlement layer

  3. Data layer

  4. Execution layer

Nodes come in two types:

  • Full nodes: Download and verify all block information and transaction data.

  • Light nodes: Download only block headers (data summaries) and validate these.

To ensure the security and availability of data, Celestia employs erasure coding and data availability sampling (DAS).

Erasure Coding and Data Availability Sampling (DAS)

Erasure coding splits the original data into chunks and arranges them into a larger matrix. For example, if the original data size is 𝐾K, it is divided into 𝑁N chunks and extended into a 2𝐾×2𝐾2K×2K matrix.

Even with only part of the 𝐾×𝐾K×K data, the entire 2𝐾×2𝐾2K×2K data can be reconstructed. This makes it difficult for malicious nodes to hide any data, as any attempt to do so would affect over 50% of the data chunks, making detection by light nodes highly probable.

Celestia's Benefits and Innovations

  1. Light Node Participation: Erasure coding allows light nodes to participate in data validation, enhancing security.

  2. Efficient Sampling: Light nodes perform sub-linear data availability sampling, needing to download only the square root of the total data chunks for verification.

  3. Increased Security: Even if a small percentage of data is hidden, it would significantly impact the data matrix, making detection by light nodes likely.

  4. Scalability: Celestia's approach enables the use of large blocks while maintaining security through distributed validation by light nodes.

  5. Fraud Proofs: Similar to other Layer 1 blockchains, full nodes can validate data using fraud proofs.

Conclusion

Celestia's use of erasure coding and data availability sampling significantly improves scalability and efficiency compared to traditional Layer 1 data availability methods. This allows Manta Pacific to offload data availability to Celestia, reducing competition for Ethereum's resources and achieving lower gas fees, comparable to those on Solana.

Celestia's cost efficiency and scalability make it a promising solution for the future of blockchain data availability.