Quick Take

• Rollup teams call for a blob increase.

• Brave Search supports ENS Lookup.

• EF 2024 Academic Grants Round winners.

Listen on: Apple | Spotify | Castbox | YouTube 

Rollup Teams Call For Blob Increases

Jesse Pollak, lead builder at Base, called for an increase in blob capacity on Ethereum, stating that current blob fees are constraining L2 growth. The demand comes amid rising blob base fee costs for rollups, driven by increasing activity and competition within the current limit of three blobs per block. Over the past week, more than 340 ETH has been burned in base blob fees. Optimism core contributor Karl Floersch emphasized that blob scaling remains the most critical feature both during and after the Pectra upgrade. The upcoming Pectra upgrade is set to double the blob capacity to six blobs per block, but the measure is expected to serve as only a temporary fix, with demand likely to outpace capacity within months. A medium-term solution, PeerDAS, a decentralized data availability sampling system, is planned in Fusaka, the fork after Pectra, to address the blob market.

Brave Search Supports ENS Lookup

Brave Search now supports resolution for ENS domain names, enabling users to instantly search any .eth second or top-level domain to view wallet balances directly in search results. The feature displays ETH and ERC-20 token balances across EVM chains, including Ethereum, Base, Optimism, Arbitrum, and Polygon. ENS is the leading naming protocol that turns hexadecimal wallet addresses into human-readable names, with nearly 2 million active .eth names registered to date. Brave is a privacy-focused browser that processes over 1.2 billion queries monthly. Users can access the ENS lookup on Brave Search, with or without the Brave Browser.

2024 EF Academic Grants Round

The Ethereum Foundation announced the grantees from its 2024 Academic Grants Round, a grant series designed to support Ethereum-related academic work addressing critical challenges in cryptography, consensus mechanisms, security, and execution. A total of $1.7 million was allocated across 41 selected grantees, which includes researchers, universities, and students.  The eight grants categories included: Client Engineering, Consensus Layer, Cryptography and Zero-Knowledge Proofs, Cybersecurity and Privacy, Economics and MEV, Formal Verification, P2P Networking, and Society and Regulation. Any researchers who missed the deadline for the Academic Grants Round are encouraged to join the Ecosystem Support Program (ESP).

Other News

• Aave hits $730m TVL on Base

• Changing blob count may delay Pectra

• Ameen on blob extremes

• Jesse on long-term blob capacity

• Francis: 6/9 is a good step for Pectra

• $80m USDT transfer to Ink

• RISC Zero partners with Irreducible

• FDIC stonewalls FOIA requests

Follow us on X, Lens, and Farcaster.