The stage before "danksharding," which is the splitting of Ethereum into multiple chains. The full sharding of Ethereum may take a while, but it is expected to increase speed to 100,000 transactions per second (TPS). The danksharding name was derived from Ethereum researchers Proto Lamda and Dankrad Feist.
Temporary Blobs of Data
Defined in the EIP-4844 upgrade, proto-danksharding creates a new type of transaction for Layer 2 blockchains that deals with "blobs" of data residing in temporary memory for approximately two weeks. Instead of verifying each transaction, the Ethereum network confirms that the blob associated with the block holds the valid data. See
Ethereum 2.0 and
blockchain sharding.