Ethereum Developers Set March 13 Timeline For Dencun Upgrade

Ethereum developers announced the date for the long-awaited and highly anticipated Dencun upgrade, which has been scheduled for March 13. 

On Wednesday, developers successfully deployed the upgrade on the third of Ethereum’s three test networks. 

Dencun Upgrade Live On March 13 

The decision to set the target date for the upgrade was set during a bi-weekly coordinating call, officially triggering the countdown to Ethereum’s most significant upgrade since April 2023. The reason behind the hype around the Dencun upgrade is Ethereum Improvement Proposal 4844, (EIP-4844), also called Proto-Danksharding, which will be bundled in the Dencun upgrade. The update will introduce “blobs” spaces within blocks that allow more information to be stored while maintaining block finality times. Crypto analyst Rony Szuster explained the concept of “blobs,” stating, 

“Those blobs are especially beneficial to Ethereum’s layer-2 blockchains, which will have more of their transactions stored in the network’s blocks. For users, this will result in layer-2 fees that are at least 10 times cheaper.”

He also highlighted that Ethereum itself could benefit from these changes, although reductions in fees on Ethereum may only be marginal. 

“Since the layer-2 transactions will have a specific block space, then Ethereum will have a little more space to include mainnet transactions.”

Proto-Danksharding will help reduce costs for transactions on Layer-2 networks built on top of Ethereum, providing a dedicated space for data storage. The decision comes only a day after Dencun was successfully implemented on the Holesky testnet, the third of Ethereum’s three test networks, without any significant hiccups. Parithosh Jananthi, a DevOps engineer at the Ethereum Foundation, stated, 

“It’s great to see years’ worth of effort finally being scheduled for Ethereum mainnet.”

Time Of Upgrade 

Developers also discussed the time of the Dencun upgrade on the Ethereum mainnet. The precise time of the upgrade on the main Ethereum network will be slot 8626176, which is set to occur at 13:55 UTC on March 13. However, the date still needs to be ratified by developers and confirmed through GitHub. 

Developers have until February 22 to release their final versions of Ethereum clients with Dencun support added. Validators will be given two weeks to update their nodes with the new client versions. 

Impact Of Dencun 

Apart from introducing Proto-Danksharding, Dencun will also help reduce the cost of the data available on Ethereum, making projects such as Avail, EigenDA, and Celestia more attractive to developers and users. Ethereum developers have already tested the upgrade thrice in a bid to ensure that it will run on the mainnet without any major hiccups. 

Developers had initially hoped Dencun would go live on the mainnet by the end of 2023. However, the upgrade faced several technical glitches, which pushed the date back considerably.

Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

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