At the last Ethereum DevCall (developer meeting) of the year, a consensus was reached for the progressive activation of the Dencun update. Between January and February, it will take shape in three testnets, and then make the jump to the main network.
Dencun will arrive on the Goerli testnet first, on January 17 at 6:32 (UTC). The next stop will be Sepolia, another testnet, on January 30 at 22:51 (UTC). Finally, the last testnet to host the update will be Holesky, on February 7 at 11:34 (UTC).
Regarding the mainnet, there is still no default epoch (specific time period) for Dencun activation. Everything will depend on how the tests go in the previous networks, detailed Tim Beiko, spokesperson for Ethereum DevCall.
There is a part of the process that has already been completed. For example, Goerli already had a "shadow fork", that is, a temporary test network was created in that environment to test the changes that Dencun will bring. The test went well and the network created was stable, with a participation rate of 99% of the validators and just a few technical details that did not affect its operation.
Regarding testing on the two remaining testnets, Beiko explained that it was chosen to move forward with Sepolia first "to give application, infrastructure and L2 developers as large a testing window as possible," taking into account that the network It has a large number of developments in it, while Holesky stands out for its larger set of validators.
Dencun is an upgrade to the Ethereum network whose name is derived from Deneb and Cancun, names of a star and a city that they use for their execution and consensus layer client upgrades, respectively. From the technical side, it will be an important event for Ethereum, because it will bring the renowned EIP-4844, also known as Proto Dank Sharding.
This improvement proposal incorporates into Ethereum the so-called blobs, a mechanism to reorganize space in transactions and reduce unused space. The main advantage for users is that it will reduce the gas, that is, the commissions, to use that block space on the network. In addition, it will allow faster transactions.
Dencun was scheduled for 2023, but its developers decided to postpone it to have more testing time. During the year that closes, Ethereum already had an essential update. We are talking about Shapella, which was activated in April and enabled the withdrawal of ethers (ETH) from staking for network validators.
