Launch Date For Highly Anticipated Ethereum Update Finally Revealed

The eagerly awaited Dencun upgrade for Ethereum is scheduled to launch on March 13th, 2024. Following the successful implementation of the Dencun upgrade on the Holesky testnet on February 7th, the Ethereum core developers team finalized the date for the mainnet rollout during the bi-weekly Consensus Layer Meeting call.

Introducing Blobs

The anticipation surrounding this update stems via Ethereum Improvement Proposal 4844 (EIP-4844), known as Proto-Danksharding, which will be integrated through Dencun. In essence, this update will introduce blobs, designated spaces within blocks allowing for increased data storage capacity while maintaining block finality times.

These blobs are particularly advantageous for the various layer-2 blockchains of Ethereum, as they will accommodate a greater volume of their transactions within the network blocks. Consequently, users can expect layer-2 fees to be at least 10 times more economical, explains Rony Szuster, a crypto analyst at Brazilian exchange Mercado Bitcoin.

Time Is Of The Essence

Szuster also emphasizes that Ethereum itself stands to benefit as a result of these changes, although the fee reductions may be relatively minor. Given that layer-2 transactions will occupy specific block space, Ethereum will consequently have slightly more room to include mainnet transactions, he adds.

With that being said, developer teams have until February 22nd to release their finalized versions of Ethereum clients with Dencun support, and validators will have approximately two weeks to update their nodes with these new client versions. As of the time of this writing, ETH is trading at around the $2,450 mark.