# blockspace is increasing!

blockspace is increasing day by day

bitcoin -> ethereum -> solana -> rollups (modular world)

at each step, blockspace has increased by some factor

## what is blockspace?

blockspace is the amount of data a block can store or the amount of gas/compute a block can use.

blockspace is usually measured in unit of gas instead of MB. bitcoin's can store anywhere around 1 to 4 MB per block. ethereum has a limit of 30 million gas per block, solana has a limit of 48 million compute units per block.

## monolith vs modular

currently, there are 2 groups in crypto, the monolith guys and the modular guys

monolith's like solana use their underlying hardware to the fullest, enabling them to provide a very low latency and fast execution enviornment for executing transactions.

as blockchains are limited by the weakest validator in network, monolith need to keep their weakest link beefier. and its working quite well for solana.

solana's blockspace is different than ethereum's, as they have parallel execution and local fee markets enabled, this helps them identify hotspots in the state and only those txs need to spend more gas, other txs work fine with same low gas.

each rollup in a modular ecosystem will have their own blockspace which will be filled by its own activity. smart contract rollups will still be bottlenecked by its base layer, compare that with sovereign rollups, who functions more like L1 are not bottlenecked by its base layer but by its own architecture. this is in some sense similar to solana's local fee markets, where every usecase/rollup has a different way of charging gas, but its still very different than solana.

achieveing cross rollup atomic transactions will be hard and the fragmentation will increase a lot with more and more rollups being deployed.

## valuable blockspace

not every blockspace is valuable

for example, take any EVM L2 that has very less amount of apps deployed, its blockspace will not be as valuable as ethereum's blockspace, because for ethereum's blockspace there are multiple users competiting but for EVM L2s blockspace, no one is competiting.

another reason why there are blockchain's will less competitive blockspace is that they don't have any valuable dapps deployed or enough liquidity that will entice users to their chain.

in a modular world, even though blockspace will be abundant, valuable blockspace will still be scarce and might be even more scarce going forward, if the base layer isn't scaled appropriately.