Hassan Maishera
TL;DR
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Ethereum developers have deployed the Dencum upgrade in the Sepolia testnet.
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When deployed on the mainnet, the upgrade is expected to significantly lower fees and increase scalability.
Ethereum’s Dencun Upgrade Goes Live on Sepolia
Ethereum’s latest major upgrade Dencun went live on the Sepolia test network yesterday. This latest development means that the upgrade has one more testnet before it launches on the mainnet.
Dencum is expected to come with a “proto-danksharding” feature and would significantly lower fees and increase scalability.
Dencun deployment on Sepolia commenced at 22:51 UTC Tuesday and was finalized soon after. While announcing this on X, Parithosh Jayanthi, DevOps engineer at the Ethereum Foundation, said, “Blobs are now flowing in Sepolia. Uneventful testnet forks are the best ones!”
The upgrade was deployed on the Goerli testnet earlier this month and Sepolia is its second testnet deployment. Dencun is set for its third and final testnet Holesky deployment, which is scheduled for Feb. 7. Once the third testnet deployment is successful, the Ethereum team is expected to establish a mainnet launch date for Dencun.
A major feature of Dencun is that it would bring proto-danksharding with the aim of lowering gas fees and improving scalability by introducing a new, compressed data storage mechanism called “blobs.”
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin explained that a blob-carrying transaction is like a regular transaction, except it also carries an extra piece of data called a blob. He said, “Blobs are extremely large (~125 kB), and can be much cheaper than similar amounts of calldata.”
Dencun is set to be the next major Ethereum upgrade following the Shapella upgrade in March 2023. Sharpella enabled users and validators to withdraw their staked ETH on the network.
Ether, Ethereum’s native coin, is up by 1.5% in the last 24 hours and is now trading at $2,314 per coin.
