Ethereum developers are preparing for Wednesday's Dencun upgrade, which is set to bring the biggest code change to the blockchain in more than a year.
Dencun, a portmanteau of the project name Deneb + Cancun, consists of two concurrent upgrades on Ethereum's consensus and execution layers.
ETH Called a “hard fork” in blockchain jargon, it is expected to begin around 8:55 p.m. (Vietnam time). The upgrade is designed to usher in a new era of cheaper fees for backend networks operating on Ethereum, called layer-2 (L2) rollup. Those changes will come with the activation of a new Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) called “proto-danksharding” or EIP-4844, which is designed to improve the ability to process data from the L2 network.
Parts of the Dencun upgrade have been planned for several years, but the developers delayed it from the original target of late 2023 due to some technical concerns. Since then, developers have tested on three separate testnets, and most of those tests have gone smoothly.
Some Ethereum fans are marking the occasion of Dencun's official launch, with the EthStaker developer community and Nethermind, the leading Ethereum infrastructure group, both hosting livestreams.
“We are ensuring all of our client applications and startup code are fully updated and ready,” said Barnabas Busa, DevOps engineer at the Ethereum Foundation. The monitoring infrastructure is scaled to ensure nothing important is missed.”
What is Dencun?
Dencun will be Ethereum's biggest update since the Shapella upgrade in April 2023, which allowed the withdrawal of staked ether (ETH).
Dencun includes a number of code changes, but the biggest change comes with “proto-danksharding,” which introduces a new method of storing transaction data on Ethereum, called “blobs.”
Layer-2s such as Arbitrum, Optimism and Polygon will benefit the most from Dencun. The networks help scale Ethereum by pooling transactions from users and then transferring them to Ethereum where they are settled in large batches. Over the past year, they have become the primary location for trading on Ethereum, amassing billions in deposits and boasting higher trading volumes than the Ethereum chain.
After Dencun, L2 will be able to upload data to Ethereum in a dedicated blobspace, instead of being forced to pay higher costs for squeezing data into regular transactions. In theory, this could help L2 process more data more efficiently, thereby reducing costs for end users.
Proto-danksharding is Ethereum's first step into "sharding", a set of techniques for dividing the blockchain into small segments (or mini chains), to process more transactions cheaply.
A full version of sharding is yet to be launched, but proto daksharding could help solve Ethereum's high gas fees in the short term by reducing fees for the L2 network.
‘Proto-danksharding’
Proto-danksharding will also benefit new blockchains that have joined the Ethereum fray, known as data availability (DA) layers. DA layers like Celestia, EigenDA and Avail help the network store large amounts of data; L2 frequently uses them to store transaction data. Proto-danksharding can make the cost of downloading DA data cheaper.
In a previous interview, Polygon co-founder Jordi Baylina said that “prices will go down mainly because it's a matter of supply and demand. The larger the supply, the greater the availability of data on Ethereum, so the price will be lower. However, it is still impossible to predict how much the number will decrease."
After Dencun, Ethereum developers will start to settle on what will be in the next upgrade, currently called Electra + Praha (Petra.) As of now, the developers are undecided What will be included in the upgrade, but it will most likely be a “Verkle Tree”, a new type of data catalog that helps nodes store large amounts of data.
“Extensibility is the fundamental unlocking capability that enables collaboration between developers across projects and teams,” said Karl Floersch, CEO of OP Labs, the main development company behind Optimism. , to build a more seamless ecosystem together.”
The upgrade “will allow a team of developers to work together to really build systems that provide an overall experience that rivals the user experience.”
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