Polkadot DA vs competition

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If we assume that the state machine replication, execution or ZK proving is not a bottleneck, then it would boil down to the amount of transactions (or other data in some cases) a blockchain can push through.

Theoretically and as of things stand now, Polkadot provides 0.66 KiB/s[1] per core or 66–132 MiB/s for the whole system, depending on the total number of cores. Number of core devs expressed opinion that this number could be further increased removing the bottlenecks in networking, improving the erasure coding, etc. No testing to verify any of those claims were performed to my knowledge.

What is known about the values of other DA layers?

  • Ethereum danksharding and proto-danksharding.
  • EigenDA,
  • Celestia,
  • Avail
  • (any other I miseed?)

I guess it’s worth noting that it’s important to look for current values and future values (along with plausiability). E.g. Celestia claimed that the capacity of the network grows with the number of light nodes, but I think it’s more complex than that.

  1. 4 MiB per PoV every relay-chain block. ↩︎

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Very small nitpick, the PoV size is actually 5MiB which brings us up to 0.83KiB/s. This also assumes that we have async backing and 6 seconds block time for parachains.

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That’s a good point! DA shouldn’t be the bottleneck for a robust blockchain system. Celestia provides a 2D RS encode with fraud proofs and Avail provides a 1.5D RS encode with KZG commitments, which are all good ways.
Just notice our grants team approved a proposal about building a DA attesting bridge in DOTSAMA, that’s awesome!