A note on the official Ethereum GitHub repository states that the testing phase of the forthcoming Ethereum upgrade, named Dencun, will begin on January 17.
The Goerli testnet will be the first to receive the upgrade, with the Sepolia and Holesky testnets receiving it in the coming weeks. The Ethereum team has not, however, released the precise timing of the upgrade’s mainnet rollout.
The renovation was originally scheduled for the last quarter of 2023, but because of the engineering difficulties, it was moved to 2024.
The Ethereum Foundation’s protocol support head, Tim Beiko, pointed out that the deadline is flexible and subject to modify in the event that significant problems develop.
In order to give stakeholders a week’s notice to get ready for the upgrade, the team plans to publish a blog post describing the fork during the week of January 8, 2024.
Source: GitHub
What Does Dencun Mean?
Deneb and Cancun, the names of a star and a city that they use for their consensus layer client upgrades and execution layer client upgrades, respectively, are the sources of the name of Dencun, an Ethereum network update.
Technically speaking, it will be significant for Ethereum since it will introduce the well-known EIP-4844, commonly referred to as Proto Dank Sharding.
The latest update comes with a number of tools designed to lower costs, provide additional functionality like staking pools and bridges, and restrict the use of smart contracts’ self-destruct functions.
So, if no major issues arise, we’re looking at the following schedule:
– Goerli: Jan 17, 6:32:00 UTC
– Sepolia: Jan 30, 22:51:12 UTC
– Holesky: Feb 7, 11:34:24 UTC… and then, mainnet 🫡 pic.twitter.com/JFRt0ZHAi8
— timbeiko.eth ☀️ (@TimBeiko) December 21, 2023
The Option To Abort
During the call, Beiko indicated that they have the ability to cancel if they find a severe problem or an unanticipated issue. He also mentioned that the goal is to publish the fork’s blog post during the first week of January, giving users a minimum of one week to finish their revisions.
“Obviously if we find a major issue or something crazy before then we can always cancel,” he said. “This would mean ideally we’re putting out the blog post for the fork sometime during the week of January 8th, so people have at least a week to update.”
Ethereum currently trading at $2,288.52 territory. Chart: TradingView.com
Dencun: Technical Aspect
In more technical terms, Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 4844, or “proto-danksharding,” is one of the main elements of Dencun. With the help of a recently developed format known as “blobs,” this proposal enables layer-2 rollup networks such as Arbitrum, Base, Polygon zkEVM, and others to temporarily store particular transaction data.
Blobs have an 18-day deletion period, in contrast to the present practice of permanently preserving data in the blockchain’s “CALLDATA” field. The creators of Ethereum predict that proto-danksharding will significantly reduce layer 2 transaction fees.
The testing phase for Ethereum updates often lasts several months prior to the mainnet rollout. Code-named “Shapella,” the prior deployment, started testing on February 7. On April 12, the mainnet launch took place.
At the time of writing, Ethereum was trading at $2,287, down 1.3% and 1.7% in the last 24 hours and seven days, respectively, data from Coingecko shows.
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