EIP-4844 is coming to Ethereum tomorrow.

What does this mean for Polygon chains?

Here’s what’s going to happen for Polygon enjoyoors:

1/ It’s coming to zkEVM in May

While 4844 goes live on Ethereum tomorrow, it will be coming to Polygon zkEVM testnet in April, and is estimated to go live on mainnet in early May, as part of the zkEVM Feijoa upgrade.

2/ Transaction fees will be reduced by 2X - 5X

Until it goes live, it will be hard to know exactly what the cost reductions are, but between a 2X to a 5X reduction in fees is estimated.

This price reduction comes from the introduction of the blob storage in 4844. The zkEVM currently posts all transaction data back to Ethereum within calldata, which will change to use this new blob storage.

Storing transaction data is currently responsible for ~80% of zkEVM fees. As this becomes cheaper to do with blob storage in 4844, so do transaction fees for users.

3/ What about CDK / PoS chains?

The Polygon PoS chain doesn’t benefit from 4844 as it’s not a rollup; and therefore doesn’t use Ethereum calldata to store transaction data.

For Polygon CDK chains, support for 4844 will be included later this year, which will provide similar price reductions in chains that are using Ethereum calldata for DA.

Any CDK chain that is using other DA solutions (including validium chains) already experiencing low transaction fees and won't be affected by 4844.

Polygon has made a proposal to change its PoS chain to become a zkEVM Validium.

This will be a big change for Lens and a massive number of other projects. But...

◆ WTF is a Validium?
◆ What's this mean for Polygon PoS?
◆ How's this different from Polygon's zkEVM Rollup?

I wrote a (~5 min read) blog post explaining it in simple terms:

→ blog.jarrodwatts.com/polygon-pos-is-becoming-a-zkevm-validium-explained