Ethereum developers have announced the target date for the highly anticipated Dencun upgrade during a bi-weekly coordination call on Thursday. The flagship feature of this upgrade, ‘proto-danksharding,’ is designed to reduce transaction costs and improve data availability on Ethereum.
The successful deployment of the Dencun upgrade on the Holesky testnet without any complications has set the stage for its activation on the Ethereum mainnet when the blockchain reaches slot 8626176, scheduled for 2:55 PM (Paris time) on March 13th. This date still needs to be ratified by the developers and confirmed via GitHub.
Implications of Proto-danksharding
The proto-danksharding will introduce a new class of transactions aimed at reducing costs for rollups by introducing ‘blobs’ for data storage. This development is also expected to decrease the cost of data availability on Ethereum, making projects like Celestia, Avail, and EigenDA more attractive.
Proto-danksharding represents the first iteration of a technical feature, known as ‘danksharding,’ that developers are seeking to implement to increase the capacity of the blockchain.
Tests and Future Perspectives
Three tests have been conducted to ensure the smooth implementation of Dencun on the mainnet, culminating in this week’s successful deployment on the Holesky testnet.
Although the set date for Dencun is later than initially expected, due to technical delays, Ethereum developers are already planning their next hard fork, Prague/Electra, which may include Verkle Trees. This new data structure is expected to help nodes store large amounts of data while maintaining their ability to validate blocks.
