A researcher going by the handle Nero_eth posted a proposal titled "Blocks Are Dead. Long Live Blobs" to the Ethereum Research forum on April 7, 2026, outlining a mechanism called Block in Blobs (BiB). The proposal addresses a data availability risk that becomes critical as Ethereum moves toward a future where validators verify cryptographic proofs rather than independently re-executing every transaction.

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What BiB Does and Why It Matters

Under the current model, Ethereum validators re-run each transaction in a block to confirm its validity. In a zkEVM architecture, that process is replaced by proof verification, which is far less computationally intensive. The problem is that a block builder could, in theory, publish a valid proof while deliberately withholding the underlying transaction data. Without that data, the chain's underlying state becomes unverifiable by external parties.

BiB addresses this by re-encoding the raw transaction byte stream from a block into EIP-4844-style blobs (the data structures introduced in Ethereum's March 2024 Dencun upgrade to serve Layer 2 rollups). The data is split into 31-byte chunks, packed into 4,096 field elements per blob, and locked to the beacon block through KZG commitments, a cryptographic scheme that ties the blob's contents to a compact, verifiable fingerprint.

The result is that transaction data availability becomes a consensus-layer requirement rather than a social norm that participants are trusted to follow.

As Nero_eth wrote in the proposal: "Validators don't need the transactions to verify commitments. They only need commitments for consensus, while DA sampling ensures the blob contents are available on the network."

The proposal also extends this logic to Block-level Access Lists (BALs), a feature slated for Ethereum's upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade. Nero_eth noted that "since the users of BALs may be different from the users of transactions, it might make sense to put BALs into blobs too but separate from the transactions."

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The Infrastructure Context

BiB is designed to extend the same data availability sampling logic introduced in Ethereum's Fusaka upgrade (December 2025), which included PeerDAS, a sampling mechanism that lets validators confirm blob data exists without downloading it entirely.

That change cut the daily blob data burden on validators by roughly 85 percent, from approximately 750 MB per day to around 112 MB. BiB extends this logic to transaction data itself, allowing validators to sample rather than download full block contents.

The Fusaka upgrade also introduced Blob Parameter Only forks, a lighter-weight process for adjusting blob capacity without triggering a full hard fork. Two such forks have already run: the current blob target per block is 14, with a maximum of 21, representing a 2.3x increase in Layer 2 data space compared to pre-Fusaka levels. The long-term target is 48 blobs per block, to be reached incrementally.

Average L2 transaction costs currently sit around $0.08, compared to $3.78 on Ethereum mainnet. Continued blob expansion beyond current levels is projected to reduce L2 fees by 40 to 60 percent and potentially more than 90 percent at scale.

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Why This Matters for Global Users

The populations most directly affected by L2 fee levels include large, price-sensitive retail user bases in high-growth adoption markets.

India ranks first in the 2026 Global Crypto Adoption Index, with a large, price-sensitive retail base for whom a $3.78 mainnet transaction is a barrier to use.

Pakistan ranks eighth, with adoption driven partly by currency instability and capital controls, where stablecoin access on affordable L2s serves as a practical financial tool.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, the picture is similarly grounded in utility rather than speculation. Nigeria ranks second globally and first in DeFi value; its remittance corridor, one of the largest in the world, exceeds $20 billion annually, with a growing portion routed through stablecoins on L2 networks.

Ethiopia and Kenya both debuted in the top 20 this year, reflecting mobile-first DeFi adoption among young populations using crypto as basic financial infrastructure.

The region saw stablecoin growth of more than 180 percent year-over-year and DeFi growth of 184 percent between Q2 2025 and Q2 2026.

For these users, BiB is not an abstract architectural concern. The guarantee it provides, that transaction data cannot be withheld even after a valid proof is published, is the security model that makes L2 rollups trustworthy for cross-border payments and savings in high-inflation environments. A weakened data availability guarantee would quietly erode the foundation those use cases depend on.

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Status and Next Steps

BiB remains a research-stage proposal. It has not been submitted as a formal Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) and is not yet on the agenda for any scheduled upgrade. It will need to go through peer review, client team assessment, and community discussion before any implementation path is determined.

Ethereum's 2026 protocol priorities, organized under three tracks (Scale, Improve UX, and Harden L1), do explicitly include advancing the zkEVM attester client from prototype toward production readiness, making the problem BiB targets a live concern for the core developer community.

The Glamsterdam upgrade, targeted for the first half of 2026, and the later Hegotá upgrade are the nearest milestones on the current protocol roadmap. BiB is designed to complement the infrastructure those upgrades advance, though it is not currently scoped to either upgrade.