The Ethereum mainnet is preparing for the launch of the highly anticipated Dencun upgrade on March 13. This upgrade will introduce proto-danksharding and blobs, with the aim of reducing transaction costs on Ethereum layer 2s.
According to Nethermind, an Ethereum infrastructure firm, the hard fork is scheduled to occur at 13:55:35 pm UTC. Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko 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 February 8, following the successful deployment of Dencun on the Holesky testnet on February 7.
Proto-danksharding is a sharding design that implements “blob-carrying transactions” to create more block space on Ethereum layer 2s. These blob-carrying transactions are similar to regular transactions but include an additional piece of data.
Blocknative states that 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.
The additional data space provided by proto-danksharding will enable both optimistic and zero-knowledge rollups to post commitments to transaction data on-chain and store the actual data in data blobs instead of calldata.
Vitalik Buterin, one of Ethereum’s creators, has emphasized the importance of scaling infrastructure to make transactions more affordable. He stated in June 2023 that Ethereum would fail if transaction costs remained high. Buterin argued that high costs push projects towards centralized alternatives.
Philippe Schommers, head of infrastructure at Gnosis, believes that the successful implementation of Dencun on the Ethereum mainnet could reduce rollup costs by up to 10 times.
Dencun combines the Cancun and Deneb upgrades and is considered the most significant upgrade 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 was launched on December 1, 2020.