Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade began its beta phase on January 17, 2024, with trials on the Goerli, Sepolia, and Holesky networks, delivering significant improvements in scalability and operational efficiency.
The Dencun upgrade introduces “proto-danksharding,” a key development designed to significantly increase Ethereum’s data storage capabilities and reduce gas fees.
Anticipation of the Dencun upgrade has had a positive impact on Ethereum’s market performance, with strong growth in the value of ETH and a surge in network activity, including NFT trading.
The Ethereum blockchain has received a major upgrade with the Dencun update, marking significant progress since the Shapella hard fork. This upcoming enhancement is critical to improving Ethereum’s scalability and operational efficiency, especially in terms of data storage capacity.
An important feature of the Dencun upgrade is the inclusion of “proto-danksharding”. This process is expected to greatly expand network bandwidth and optimize overall performance, which is a key step in the continued development of Ethereum.
Main development and testing schedule
As the Ethereum community prepared for this major update, developers developed a rigorous testing plan. The first phase of the Dencun upgrade testnet is scheduled to take place on January 17, 2024 on the Goerli network. This phase will be followed by testing on the Sepolia and Holesky networks on January 31 and February 7, 2024 respectively.
However, these dates are provisional and may change if any major issues arise during testing. Tim Beiko, a key figure at the Ethereum Foundation, said that a comprehensive blog post will be shared in early January 2024 to provide stakeholders with detailed insights into the upgrade and its impact.
The technical aspects of the Dencun upgrade are both complex and groundbreaking. At the heart of this upgrade is the introduction of “proto-danksharding,” a mechanism that significantly enhances Ethereum’s data storage capabilities. This is achieved through the use of “blobs”, a novel transaction type that provides extra space for data.
These blobs are strategically designed to reduce Ethereum gas fees by relocating aggregate data from the more costly Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) layer to the consensus layer. The introduction of original danksharding, with a limit of 16 blobs per block and an upper limit of 128 KB per blob, resulted in an additional 2 MB of space per processed block, significantly increasing the network’s data storage capacity.
