The Ethereum Dencun upgrade schedule has been announced!

Indra55

After the completion of the "Shanghai+Capella (Shapella) upgrade" on April 12th this year, the Ethereum community is eagerly anticipating the next major upgrade, known as the "Dencun upgrade." Originally scheduled for the end of 2023, it was delayed to 2024 due to consensus issues.

Today, Tim Beiko, the Protocol Support lead at the Ethereum Foundation, officially announced on X that the Dencun upgrade will undergo testing on the Goerli testnet starting on January 17th. It will then be deployed on Sepolia on January 30th and on Holesky on February 7th. If all goes well, developers aim to deploy the changes on the mainnet by the end of February 2024. However, these dates may be subject to change based on the results of the testnet launch. For reference, the Shapella upgrade started testing on February 7th and was released to the mainnet on April 12th, so there might be a similar time gap.

Beiko added that an article covering fork details will be released in the second week of January 2024 to provide stakeholders with sufficient time to adapt to the update.

The Dencun upgrade, composed of the synthetic words "Cancun" and "Deneb," enhances scalability and reduces transaction fees. The "Cancun" upgrade occurs on the Ethereum execution layer, encompassing rule changes for all protocols. On the other hand, 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 through Ethereum Improvement Proposal 4844 (EIP-4844). This proposal aims to enhance Ethereum's scalability and reduce transaction fees on Layer 2 networks by allowing Ethereum nodes to temporarily store and retrieve off-chain data, going beyond the current Layer 2 solutions.

The Dencun upgrade also includes other proposals such as EIP-1153, introducing a "temporary storage" system to further reduce costs, and EIP-4788, enhancing transparency by storing the root of each beacon chain block in smart contracts.

Originally scheduled for the end of this year, the Dencun upgrade was delayed to next year due to consensus issues, as developers faced unanimous consensus problems during the upgrade testing process in October.

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Iti9

Why upgrade, and what will it be upgraded to?

Kahn332

You can explore and take a look at this testnet.