Dencun, the next major upgrade on Ethereum network could be delayed as late as next year as its testnet version has not been implemented yet.
In the 118th Consensus Layer Meeting yesterday, Ethereum developers talked over the potential release time for the upcoming Dencun upgrade. Tim Beiko, the prominent figure from the Ethereum Foundation hosted the meeting and he shared concerns on the to-be-delayed release of Dencun upgrade on mainnet.
The core Ethereum developers discussed that the upgrade is not yet introduced on testnets as it’s currently in devnet phase. The upgrade is set to be tested on a local developer network called ‘Devnet 9’ next week prior to its release on public testnets.
Beiko expressed that if Dencun is not introduced on public testnet before Devconnect event taking place in November, 2023, the mainnet implementation for the upgrade might not occur this year as projected before.
The proposal EIP-4844 dubbed Dencun Upgrade was introduced in February 2022 and it aims to improve Ethereum scalability by introducing major updates in the execution layer and consensus layer.
The upgrade introduces a new transaction format called “shard blob transactions” which will allow storing off-chain data temporarily till Ethereum nodes access it and broadcast to the network. This will ultimately reduce gas fees even more on layer 2 rollups such as Arbitrum and Optimism.
With this upgrade, the execution layer – the smart contract execution engine – will be renamed to Cancun and the consensus layer – which sees the network decentralization via staking – will be renamed to Deneb. Hence the upgrade is named Dencun and its also known as proto-danksharding.
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