Ether (ETH) price has risen above the $4,000 mark for the first time since December 2021 ahead of a series of network upgrades collectively known as the Deneb-Cancun or Dencun upgrade.
The Dencun upgrade will be implemented on the Ethereum mainnet on March 13, 2024. The highly-anticipated Ethereum upgrade will be headlined by EIP-4844, or proto-danksharding, which is expected to massively reduce gas fees on L2 networks.
In this article, we explain the Ethereum Dencun upgrade and its implications — with lower gas fees on Layer 2s as the headline act.
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The Dencun upgrade is an Ethereum upgrade that marks the start of “The Surge” era of the Ethereum roadmap. During “The Surge,” Ethereum will prioritize scalability and will aim, according to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, to hit “100,000 transactions per second and beyond.”.
The Dencun upgrade consists of nine Ethereum improvement proposals (EIPs), including EIP-4844 or proto-danksharding, which will introduce temporary storage space called “data blobs” for Ethereum L2 networks to use.
The extra storage space enabled by temporary data blobs will increase the data availability capacity of the Ethereum mainnet. L2 rollups can now use this extra space to efficiently submit their data to the mainnet, ultimately leading to reduced L2 gas fees for the end user.
For this reason, Proto-danksharding is widely expected to “facilitate an ecosystem-wide move to rollups.”
The Ethereum Dencun will land on Ethereum on Wednesday, March 13, 2024, occurring at “Beacon Slot 8626176.” All going well, the code deployment will happen at 9.55 am ET / 1.55 pm GMT. You can follow the countdown clock here.
Let’s understand the nine EIPs that will be implemented during the Dencun Ethereum upgrade, as explained by the Ethereum protocol development team.