Testing ‘went very well’ — ETH devs to set Dencun hard fork date on Thursday

Ethereum developers plan to set a mainnet launch date for the Dencun upgrade on Thursday — which will introduce several EIPs, including proto-dank sharding that is expected to drive down transaction costs on layer-2s.

In a Feb. 1 post to Reddit, Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko said recent testing of the upgrade “went very well” and highlighted key details of the All Developer Execution Call (ACDE) 180 call, where Ethereum developers drew attention to the recent success of the Sepolia fork on Jan. 30 as well as the upcoming Holesky testnet upgrade on Feb. 7.

The Dencun upgrade includes several major alterations to Ethereum’s consensus and execution layers, outlined in a Jan. 24 blog post from the Ethereum Foundation.

The upgrade will follow last year’s Shapella upgrade, executed on the Ethereum mainnet on April 12, 2023. The upgrade allowed the unstaking of Ether and was regarded as an important update to onboard more institutional investors to Ethereum.

“Assuming everything looks good by then, we'll pick a mainnet fork time on next week's ACDC [All Core Developers Call],” said Beiko. The next ACDC call is scheduled for late next week.

Galaxy Digital’s vice president of research, Christine Kim pinned the chances of a Dencun mainnet activation by the end of March at 80%, adding that it was also possible that Dencun could go live by the end of February, but said the odds of this were closer to 40%.

Quick notes from today's Eth dev call, ACDE #180:
- Devs are planning to set a mainnet date for Dencun activation *next Thurs on ACDC #127*.
(Devs could feasibly schedule out mainnet activation 3 weeks from the meeting, which would put Dencun activation at end of Feb, instead…

— Christine Kim (@christine_dkim) February 1, 2024

The Dencun network upgrade was activated on the Goerli testnet on Jan. 17, introducing several EIPs, including EIP-4844, which enables proto-dank sharding, a highly anticipated improvement that developers say will significantly reduce transaction fees on Ethereum layer-2s.

Proto-dank sharding aims to reduce the cost of rollups, which typically batch transactions and data off-chain and submit computational proof to the Ethereum blockchain. It does so by making data availability cheaper, by way of introducing a new compartmentalized container for data called "blobs."