The Ethereum mainnet is preparing to launch the highly anticipated Dencun upgrade on March 13. This upgrade will introduce proto-danksharding and blobs, which are designed to reduce transaction costs on Ethereum layer 2s.
The hard fork is scheduled to occur at 13:55:35 pm UTC, as announced by Nethermind, an Ethereum infrastructure firm, in a post on Feb. 8. Tim Beiko, an Ethereum core developer, added that this timing corresponds to approximately slot 8626176 on the Ethereum network.
The date for the upgrade was determined during an “AllCoreDevs” call on Feb. 8, following the successful deployment of Dencun on the Holesky testnet on Feb. 7.
Proto-danksharding is a sharding design that implements “blob-carrying transactions” to create more block space on Ethereum layer 2s. These transactions are similar to normal transactions but carry an additional piece of data.
According to Blocknative, proto-danksharding will limit the number of blobs in each block to 16, with each blob being no larger than 128 KB. This is expected to add approximately 2 megabytes of block space. Both optimistic and zero-knowledge rollups will be able to utilize this extra data space to post commitments to transaction data on-chain and store the actual data in data blobs instead of calldata.
Vitalik Buterin, one of the creators of Ethereum, has emphasized the importance of scaling infrastructure to ensure the success of the platform. He previously stated in June 2023 that Ethereum would fail if transactions remained expensive and if centralized workarounds were adopted instead of utilizing the chain.
A successful implementation of the Dencun upgrade on the Ethereum mainnet could potentially reduce rollup costs by up to 10 times, according to Philippe Schommers, the head of infrastructure at Gnosis, in a recent interview with Cointelegraph.
Dencun combines the Cancun and Deneb upgrades and is considered the most significant upgrade for Ethereum since the Shapella upgrade in April 2023. The Shapella upgrade allowed the unstaking of Ether (ETH) from the Beacon Chain for the first time since the proof-of-stake chain launched on Dec. 1, 2020.