Countdown to Dencun Triggered

Countdown to Dencun is… ON

February has been all about the newest Ethereum’s upgrade – Dencun.

Key date to keep in mind is March 13th, 2024; more specifically 13:55:35 UTC where the upgrade is set to go live.

At time of publication, 14 days are left until the Dencun’s upgrade.

Relax, there is nothing you need to do to prepare for the Dencun upgrade, just keep an eye on your calendar, and BitDelta will be covering all news, in real time.

What you need to know:

• The Dencun upgrade is designed to reduce costs for layer-2 transactions and data availability on Ethereum.

• This is considered the blockchain’s biggest changes since April 2023.

• The upgrade was successfully deployed Wednesday on the third of three test networks.

The upcoming upgrade is primarily known for its “proto-danksharding” feature. Sounds a bit complicated… so let’s break it down.

This feature is supposed to reduce costs on Ethereum’s layer-2 networks, with dedicated data storage.

The decision was communicated during the all-core developers consensus layer call 127 – a day after the upgrade was successfully added to the Holesky testnet, the third of three test networks, without any challenges.

The reason why the crypto community is anticipating this update is Ethereum Improvement Proposal 4844 (EIP-4844), called “Proto-Danksharding”, which will be included through Dencun.

In simple terms, this update will introduce ‘blobs’, which are spaces within blocks allowing more information to be stored while maintaining block finality times.

The exact 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 exactly 13:55 UTC on March 13 (so you still have time to put an alarm or calendar update).

Until then the developer teams are on a tight timeline to release their final versions of their Ethereum clients with the Dencun support before February 22, and validators will have approximately two weeks to update their nodes with these new client versions.

Will Dencun Upgrade Affect Me Personally?

As mentioned earlier, you do not need to do anything to get ready for this upgrade – just welcome it with open hands.

It will happen seamlessly, and users worldwide won’t have to change any way in which they interact with either ETH or any of its layer 2 networks.

Can I watch the Dencun upgrade live, in real time? If you’re as passionate about crypto as we are, yes, you can!

Ethernow.xyz is a real time observability platform for Ethereum and you will be able to watch blocks and transactions come into the mempool at the exact time as Dencun is rolled out.

Dencun – Just a Temporary Solution?

Now that we have covered the essentials of the upgrade, we have to ask ourselves: 

is Dencun alone enough to scale Ethereum?

It is important to remember that network capacity has been a growing issue for ETH. While the Dencun Upgrade might be of help, the broader solution is tied to multi-chain solutions.

• ETH has its limitations
• It’s been clear from the very beginning that the existing technology would be unable to handle large volumes of transactions

The Dencun upgrade is definitely a step in the right direction, but it is only a short-term patch where sustainable and long-term solutions will be needed.

The upgrade is mainly focused on making data storage more efficient. Although it will be beneficial, the long-term issue facing the ETH network is, again, capacity.

Moving forward, the focus must be on expanding that capacity to eventually support the increasing number of transactions being executed.