According to CoinDesk, Ethereum developers have set a target date of March 13 for the long-awaited Dencun upgrade, officially triggering the countdown to the blockchain's biggest changes since April 2023. The Dencun upgrade is primarily known for its 'proto-danksharding' feature, which aims to reduce costs for transactions on auxiliary 'layer-2' networks built atop Ethereum by providing a dedicated space for data storage. The decision was communicated during the all core developers consensus layer call 127, just one day after the upgrade was successfully added to the Holesky testnet, the third of three test networks, without any issues.
The precise moment of the Dencun upgrade on the main Ethereum network, also known as a 'hard fork', will trigger when the blockchain reaches slot 8626176, occurring at 13:55 UTC on March 13. The date needs to be ratified by developers and confirmed via the open-source software platform GitHub. Dencun will enable a new type of transaction class called 'proto-danksharding', which will help reduce the costs of transactions for rollups, through the introduction of data 'blobs', a new category for storing data. The upgrade is also expected to help reduce the cost of data available on Ethereum, making projects like Celestia, Avail, and EigenDA more attractive.
Developers have run through three tests to ensure that Dencun will run smoothly on the mainnet, culminating in this week's deployment on the Holesky testnet. Proto-danksharding is the first iteration of a technical feature, known as 'danksharding', that developers are working towards implementing to scale the blockchain. The inked-in date for Dencun means that the upgrade will go live later than the developers had initially planned for. They originally targeted it for the end of 2023, but due to technical delays, the upgrade was pushed to early 2024. As part of the Ethereum roadmap, developers are already planning their next hard fork, Prague/Electra, which could potentially include 'Verkle Trees', a new type of data structure that should help nodes store large amounts of data 'without losing the ability to validate blocks'.
