Getting to grips with cryptocurrency isn’t easy. Even after you’ve got your head around Bitcoin and Ethereum and the difference between proof-of-work and proof-of-stake, there’s still a whole new world of terminology to learn and understand.
But even among fairly hardened cryptonians, there are still terms that are difficult to understand. Here are the seven terms that almost nobody in blockchain understands as fully or as deeply as they’d like.
Blobs
In the 1958 movie starring Steve McQueen, and its 1988 remake, The Blob is an amoeba-like jello monster that terrorizes the inhabitants of a small town, growing larger and redder as it consumes them.
In crypto, most especially Ethereum, blobs (Binary Large Objects) are substantial chunks of data not required by Ethereum’s electronic virtual machine (EVM). Blob data is held onchain for around 20-90 days and then deleted.
Source: John Iriving
The result is a more cost-effective and scalable blockchain. As part of Ethereum’s Dencum update, blobs are often discussed in parallel to the next term on this list.
Blobs may also refer to chunks of data held on decentralized storage systems such as IPFS or Filecoin. These blobs are encrypted and stored across multiple nodes.
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Finally, blobs can also refer to transaction blobs on Monero, which is the binary data of a transaction before it is broadcast to the network. Being that Monero is a privacy chain these blobs are structured in a way to maintain anonymity.
And that’s a whole lot of blobs.
Rollups
Rollups are a way of processing transactions on layer-2 protocols, freeing up valuable space on the base layer. A rollup folds transaction upon transaction on the layer-2 level, sometimes dozens of times over, then rolls them together before sending the data back to layer-1.
There are two main types of rollups, optimistic and zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs.
Optimistic rollups is a fairly clear term. It means the rollup operates on an “optimistic” approach, assuming a transaction is valid unless proven wrong by a validator. They only check the validity…
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