Today, at 13:55 UTC, or more precisely at block 8626176 of the Beacon Chain, the Dencun hard fork upgrade of the Ethereum blockchain was successfully executed.
Its implementation combines two specific upgrades, known as Deneb and Cancun, where the first essentially concerns the consensus layer, while the second refers to the execution layer.
Dencun marks a milestone for the world’s most well-known smart contract platform, and introduces improvements that could be remembered for a long time in Ethereum’s history.
Below is everything you absolutely need to know.
Summary
Dencun kicks off: the long-awaited update of the Ethereum blockchain is successfully executed
After the Shapella update dated April 2023, which started the unstaking of previously locked ETH within the Beacon Chain, Ethereum now concludes another fundamental chapter of its existence by inaugurating the Dencun hard fork.
This kind of substantial protocol change comes after the same renewal procedures have been tested on the Goerli, Sepolia, and Holesky testnets, sometimes encountering quite a few difficulties.
Technically, Dencun combines two other updates that occur simultaneously on the consensus and execution levels of Ethereum (Deneb + Cancun).
Several projects revolving around the Ethereum ecosystem, such as Optimism, Starknet, Arbitrum, and many others, have celebrated in synergy the ongoing technological revolution.
Its implementation among the various clients operating on the network is designed to improve scalability, which remains the Achilles’ heel of the infrastructure designed by Vitalik Buterin even after years.
One of the most significant changes introduced with Dencun is, in fact, the introduction of the concept of “proto-danksharding” designed within the ‘EIP-4844 with the aim of reducing layer-2 fees, anticipating the future revision of “sharding”.
The update completed today, however, adds many other infrastructure improvements, celebrating various Ethereum Improvement Proposals such as EIP-1153, EIP-4788, EIP-5656, EIP-6780, EIP-7044, EIP-7045, EIP-7514, and EIP-7516.
The work of Ethereum developers, who have been planning for years to shape the protocol by adding innovations that will improve scalability, has finally been completed even though it arrived after some delay in the original schedule that saw Dencun being launched in 2023.
However, despite encountering small hiccups along the way, the entire cryptographic community of Ethereum definitively closes the door on a brilliant era in the history of smart contracts and opens a gateway that projects us directly into the future.
Many fans and active members of the ecosystem such as EthStaker and Nethermind validators, took the opportunity to celebrate together the milestone reached, joining in a livestream with their audience.
WARNING: the update of the clients will happen automatically based on the provider you are relying on. Whether you are a LST staker or a simple holder, you don’t have to do anything.
If, instead, you are only a staker (and have locked 32+ ETH on the Beacon Chain) you absolutely must update both the execution layer and the consensus layer, otherwise risking continuous slashing of the staked ether.
The advantages brought by Dencun to the world of layer-2: a small step towards danksharding
As mentioned, the Dencun update brings substantial benefits in terms of Ethereum scalability, introducing the concept of “proto-danksharding” within layer-2 networks such as Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon ZkEVM, zkSync, Starknet, and many others.
In this phase, which anticipates the future implementation of sharding, with which the work of the blockchain will be fragmented, the so-called “blobs” have been introduced
The BLOBs are data storage spaces (as well as a new type of transaction), that replace the traditional pointers to calldata.
The blobs can be described as smaller partitions of the Ethereum database that allow to manage specific data segments improving the overall efficiency of the chain.
This translates into a significant reduction in gas costs incurred by various L2 rollups in the cryptographic ecosystem and greater transaction scalability.
It is estimated in this regard that in the coming days, when all second-level chains have updated their sequencers, the milestone of 100,000 tp/s on Ethereum will be reached.
Regarding saving on fees, projections indicate a cost reduction of almost 5 times compared to the original price required to carry out an operation.
We remind you that, unlike what is erroneously described by less experienced people, the cost of transactions on the main layer remains UNCHANGED, while the advantage will be exclusively on layer-2
As we approach the full version of sharding with this kind of compromise improving the experience for the end user in the Ethereum rollup ecosystem, the Dencun update marks another huge advantage.
Indeed, the proto-danksharding will also benefit the class of data availability (DA) protocols such as Celestia, EigenDA, and Avail, helping networks store large amounts of data at reduced costs.
In this regard, we emphasize how L2 consistently use DA projects to store their on-chain data. Dencun could make it much cheaper to move large amounts of information, opening the doors to a phase of expansion for this niche.
Regarding the success of the Ethereum hard fork and the milestone achieved in the context of DA, Polygon’s co-founder, Jordi Baylina, stated the following in an interview with Coindesk:
“Prices should go down mainly because it’s a matter of supply and demand. Your supply is higher, the availability of data on Ethereum will be higher, so the price should go down.”
Although we still do not know to what extent savings could occur, we can certainly affirm that Ethereum blockchain developers will be much freer to build smoothly, without thinking too much about technical hitches caused by data costs and network fees in rollups.
Now the limit for creating successful protocols on Ethereum is only imagination: the future has arrived, and it looks brighter than ever.
