Now that Dencun has been successfully deployed on the various Ethereum (ETH) testnets, the mainnet update is the next big step. Expected on March 13, it will activate, among other things, the famous Proto-Danksharding and its data blobs. We take stock.
Dencun is scheduled for March 13 on the Ethereum mainnet
The Deneb and Cancun updates for Ethereum’s consensus and execution layers (ETH), known by the contraction Dencun, are the network’s next major milestone. As a priority project since Shapella, the community has been waiting for Dencun for several months.
This update has already been successfully implemented on the various Ethereum testnets, namely Goerli on January 17, Sepolia on January 31 and Holesky on Wednesday. Now that we’re in the home stretch, Tim Beiko, a developer with the Ethereum Foundation, has revealed when this new feature will come into play:
Blobs are coming to mainnet at slot 8626176 .oO
– timbeiko.eth ☀️ (@TimBeiko) February 8, 2024
Dencun should thus be operational on the Ethereum mainnet at slot number 8 626 176 of the Beacon Chain. As a slot lasts on average 12 seconds, a quick calculation between this target and the current state of the network gives us the result of 33.33 days, which corresponds to the date of next March 13.
As we’ve explained in the past, Dencun will be introducing a batch of 9 Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), but the most eagerly awaited of all is EIP-4844. The latter will deploy Proto-Danksharding on the blockchain symbolized by its famous data blobs.
In a nutshell, these are a major advance in the protocol, as they enable certain non-essential data to be organized in packets destined to be deleted at regular intervals. In the long term, this will have the effect of making the blockchain much less cumbersome to store than it should be in the current model.
EIP-4844 is therefore an important step towards full Danksharding, which is destined to be even more efficient than the current model, but which will still require a great deal of work before it can be realized on Ethereum.
