2026-05-09 –, Sladkovský Stage
PeerDAS reduced the bandwidth usage of consensus layer clients, but block publishing can still be problematic for home stakers. Partial data columns (EIP-8136) can further reduce bandwidth drastically. I will explain how it works and share some measurements from the devnet to highlight the advantages for home stakers and other node operators.
I have been working on Partial Columns at Lighthouse, both on the spec and on the implementation. With this feature, home stakers with limited bandwidth will be much more viable again - especially when proposing self-built blocks. This feature will be tested on public testnets soon, and as it is not tied to Glamsterdam, we may even start benefiting from it on mainnet not too far in the future. This also allows us to gauge the performance benefits in practice, potentially allowing us to further raise the blob limit with the next fork.
As the bandwidth savings increase the more nodes enable this feature, I hope to encourage node operators on testnets and mainnet to enable it soon after the clients release it.
Core Developer working on Lighthouse at Sigma Prime, focusing on improving Ethereum's networking stack.