I’ve been thinking about this proposal alongside what DoubleZero just did with Edge, and I think there’s a version of this that solves more of the problems raised in this thread if we shift the framing.
Even with volume discounts and a congestion multiplier, $/MB as the base unit keeps DA in commodity territory. Celestia blobs are $0.03/MB, Ethereum is $0.06/MB, and competitive pressure only pushes those numbers down. Fibre targets 1 Tb/s. If the game is “who offers the cheapest megabyte,” we can survive that race but we’re not going to win it.
Telecoms figured this out decades ago. Nobody buys bandwidth by the megabyte anymore. You buy a service tier with guaranteed performance, and the provider manages capacity behind the scenes.
DoubleZero Edge as a reference
DoubleZero’s Edge platform does something worth looking at here. Validators connected to DoubleZero don’t pay per-packet, they’re exempt from the 5% block reward fee. Revenue comes from subscription fees paid by traders who want guaranteed low-latency data delivery. They’re not selling cheaper packets. They’re selling deterministic performance. Different unit of account entirely.
What this looks like applied to DA
Instead of fixed fee + volume discount, three service tiers. Each bundles a throughput guarantee, an inclusion SLA, and a marginal rate.
| Tier | Access fee | Throughput guarantee | Inclusion SLA | Marginal rate | Target user |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open | Free | None (best effort) | None | Full spot price (c₀) | New rollups, testnets, experiments |
| Pro | Monthly subscription | Up to X MB/s guaranteed | Priority inclusion within N blocks | 0.50 × c₀ | Production rollups with steady usage |
| Enterprise | Annual commitment | Reserved capacity up to Y MB/s | Guaranteed inclusion, latency SLA | 0.25 × c₀ | High-throughput rollups (Bullet-scale) |
“Open” is not free DA. Rollups still pay per-blob gas fees at spot rate for every byte, best effort inclusion at market price. That’s actually the most expensive per-MB option you can pick. The discounts kick in when you commit, because you’re giving the protocol predictable revenue in return.
The difference from the original proposal is that rollups choose their tier based on what they need going forward, rather than their trailing 30-day usage. Forward-looking instead of backward-looking.
Growth concern
I think the $10,000 per namespace is prohibitive to network growth; it’s too early to charge entry fees like this.
Agreed, and this is where the tier model helps. Open tier has no barrier to entry. Any rollup starts posting DA at spot rates today. Pro and Enterprise are opt-in upgrades, you move up when you actually need guaranteed performance, meaning you have real usage and real users. You’re paying for the service at that point, not paying for permission to exist.
More rollups posting data at the Open tier means more ecosystem activity, stronger case for lazybridging, and eventually the kind of network effects that justify premium pricing. Get them in the door first, charge for guarantees once they need them.
Commitment-based pricing fits here
Instead of starting from current market rates and then applying discounts, we can invert the model and start from user commitment.
The Enterprise tier is basically this. Annual commitment, upfront payment for a reserved capacity allocation. Unused capacity expires (burns). That smooths demand for validators and gives the protocol predictable revenue.
And it avoids the gas futures problem because the commitment is to a capacity allocation, not a future price. Blob fees within the allocation still settle at whatever the prevailing marginal rate is for the tier.
Congestion multiplier: only beyond guarantees
I’d keep the congestion multiplier from the original proposal but only apply it to usage beyond a rollup’s guaranteed allocation. Within allocation: marginal rate per tier, no multiplier. Beyond allocation: spot rate × M(u).
If a Pro rollup stays within its throughput guarantee, it pays a predictable discounted rate regardless of what’s happening chain-wide. Burst usage above the guarantee gets dynamic pricing. That separation is what makes the subscription worth paying for.
Revenue at current usage
Using the existing assumptions from the original post (20 small, 8 medium, 2 large chains):
| Segment | Count | Tier | Access fee | Marginal revenue | Total per DAA | Segment revenue |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Small | 15 | Open | $0 | ~$1,892 | ~$1,892 | ~$28,380 |
| Small (upgraded) | 5 | Pro | $2,500/mo | ~$946 | ~$31,446 | ~$157,230 |
| Medium | 8 | Pro | $5,000/mo | ~$6,624 | ~$66,624 | ~$532,992 |
| Large | 2 | Enterprise | $120,000/yr | ~$22,366 | ~$142,366 | ~$284,732 |
Annualized that’s about ~$1,003,334. Roughly 66% higher than the $602,744 projected under the original model at current usage, and the Open tier still keeps the door open.
Implementation
Phase 1 is basically the status quo: Open tier only, everything at spot rates. Phase 2 introduces Pro with optional throughput guarantees and priority inclusion, which requires the DAA abstraction plus on-chain SLA enforcement. Phase 3 adds Enterprise with annual commitments once there are enough Pro rollups to show the demand is real. Phase 4 layers in the congestion multiplier, only beyond guaranteed allocations, only once utilization actually matters.
Open questions
How do you enforce throughput guarantees on-chain? Guaranteed inclusion within N blocks requires validator-level coordination. Might need to be baked into consensus rules or handled through a priority fee market within the tier. Not trivial.
On denomination:
If we have that good minimum value per MB we should figure out a way to reduce how TIA price volatility affects this value to the up and downside.
Subscription fees in USD (stablecoin or oracle-adjusted TIA) would give rollups the budget predictability that actually makes service tiers worth buying.
And what happens if guaranteed capacity goes underutilized chain-wide? If Pro/Enterprise rollups reserve more throughput than the chain uses, validators earn less in congestion fees. Subscription fees need to cover that gap. The guaranteed allocations become a floor on protocol revenue, which is probably fine, that’s the whole point of selling commitments.
TL;DR: price DA like infrastructure-as-a-service with performance tiers and guarantees instead of by the megabyte with discounts. DoubleZero Edge is already doing a version of this for network infrastructure. Per-byte fees still exist but they’re a metering mechanism inside a tier, not the main revenue source.