The Ethereum “Dencun’” upgrade will be implemented on Goerli testnet on Jan. 17, followed by Sepolia and Holesky testnets in the following weeks.
Ethereum’s forthcoming upgrade, “Cancun-Deneb” (also known as “Dencun”), will begin testing on Jan.17, according to a note published on the official Ethereum Github repository. The upgrade will first be applied to the Goerli testnet, then added to Sepolia on Jan. 30 and Holesky on Feb. 7. The Ethereum team has yet to announce when Dencun will be implemented on the mainnet.
The new upgrade includes several tools intended to reduce fees, allow for new features of bridges and staking pools, and limit the use of self-destruct operations on smart contracts.
According to its developer documents, Dencun will contain Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 4844, also known as “proto-danksharding.” This will allow layer-2 rollup networks like Arbitrum, Base, Polygon zkEVM and others to store certain transaction data temporarily, using a new format called “blobs.” Blobs can be deleted after 18 days, whereas the current practice is to include the data in the CALLDATA field and keep it on the blockchain forever. Ethereum developers believe that proto-danksharding will significantly reduce transaction fees on layer-2s.
