The Ethereum Dencun upgrade, originally scheduled for the end of 2023, has been delayed due to consensus issues. Today, Tim Beiko, the protocol support officer of the Ethereum Foundation, announced on X that testing will begin on January 17th on the Goerli test network, with more details to be released by the development team in the second week of January.
Following the completion of the “Shanghai + Capella (Shapella) upgrade” on April 12th, the next major upgrade that the Ethereum community has been eagerly anticipating is the “Dencun upgrade”. This upgrade will facilitate the overall expansion and efficiency of Ethereum and was originally planned to be implemented by the end of 2023. However, due to consensus issues, it has been postponed until 2024.
Today, Tim Beiko, the protocol support officer of the Ethereum Foundation, officially announced on X that the Dencun upgrade will first undergo testing on the Goerli test network on January 17th, followed by deployment on Sepolia on January 30th and deployment on Holesky on February 7th. If all goes well, the developers aim to deploy the changes on the mainnet before the end of February 2024. However, these dates may be subject to change based on the results of the test network launch. In the past, the Shapella upgrade started testing on February 7th and was released to the mainnet on April 12th, so there may be a few months’ interval.
Beiko added that an article covering the details of the fork will be published in the second week of January 2024 to provide stakeholders with sufficient time to adapt to the updates.
The Dencun upgrade, a combination of “Cancun” and “Deneb”, is a key milestone after the “Shanghai + Capella (Shapella) upgrade”. The “Cancun” upgrade occurs at the Ethereum execution layer and includes rule changes for all protocols, while the consensus layer responsible for block validation will undergo its own fork, known as “Deneb”. Together, they are referred to as “Dencun”.
A key feature of the Dencun upgrade is proto-danksharding, proposed by Ethereum Improvement Proposal 4844 (EIP-4844). This proposal aims to enhance Ethereum’s scalability and reduce transaction fees on the second layer network by allowing Ethereum nodes to temporarily store and retrieve off-chain data, surpassing current second layer solutions. The Dencun upgrade also includes several other proposals, such as EIP-1153, which introduces a “temporary storage” system to further reduce costs, and EIP-4788, which enhances transparency by storing the root of each beacon chain block in smart contracts.
Originally planned for the end of the year, the Dencun upgrade has been delayed to next year due to consensus issues. In June of this year, Ethereum core developers initially anticipated that the Dencun upgrade would be launched before the end of this year. However, in late October, Potuz, a developer from the popular CL client Prysm, pointed out that there were consistent consensus issues among developers during the testing and upgrade process, making it unlikely to complete the upgrade before the Christmas holiday. It has now been officially scheduled for January 17th next year.
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Dencun
ethereum
Goerli
Goerli test network
upgrade
Cancun