The webinar “Securing Ethereum’s Scalability: A Look at Danksharding and Post-Quantum Cryptography”, which took place on August 20, 2025, is now available to watch online. This 90-minute session featured expert insights into Ethereum’s scalability roadmap and the future of blockchain security in the post-quantum era.
Speakers and Topics:
Etienne Riviere (Professor, UCLouvain)
Talk: The Upcoming Danksharding Evolution of Ethereum and the Data Availability Layer
Ethereum is facing serious scalability challenges and the associated costs for decentralized applications. Among the solutions available to scale up Ethereum transaction processing capacity, layer-2 networks such as rollups, are particularly promising. Rollups process transactions off the main (layer-1) chain and only post summaries of the resulting block to the main chain, anchoring them with the trust guarantees it provides at only a fraction of the cost. Layer-2s also need to share (compressed) transaction data to their participants, which can happen through ad-hoc mechanisms or via dedicated mechanisms built in the layer-1. In this presentation, I will briefly recap the principles of rollups, the interaction between layer-1 and layer-2, and the need for a data availability layer. I will present the current mechanisms for attaching layer-2 data to layer-1 blocks and their limitations, and introduce the upcoming “Danksharding” design that Ethereum envisions for scaling up data availability support. I will explain the principles of Data Availability Sampling, a technique that allows for the sharing of coded layer-2 data only partially to nodes in the Ethereum network while guaranteeing overall data availability. I will finally give an overview of recent work towards supporting Data Availability Sampling as part of Ethereum’s core mechanisms, and in particular its time-constraint consensus operation.
Related publication: arxiv.org/abs/2507.00824
Sushmita Ruj (Faculty Lead, UNSW Institute for Cybersecurity)
Talk: Post-Quantum Cryptography for Blockchains
Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) is gaining importance as a critical component of securing blockchain systems against future quantum threats. The session examined existing cryptographic algorithms that are susceptible to quantum attacks and are likely to be phased out in favor of quantum-resistant alternatives. It also addressed the key challenges in making this transition and highlighted recent progress in areas such as signature schemes, commitment schemes, and zero-knowledge proofs—all essential to building secure, quantum-resilient blockchain infrastructures.
Watch the full recording here