According to The Block, Ethereum core developers have deployed the Dencun hard fork upgrade on the Goerli testnet, which includes the important Ethereum Improvement Proposal EIP-4844 (Proto-danksharding).
During a live stream, core developers confirmed that the Dencun upgrade was forked on the Goerli testnet at around 2:35 pm Taiwan time on Wednesday the 17th. However, the upgrade encountered some obstacles, including potential “chain splits” caused by synchronization issues between clients. The client teams are expected to investigate this issue and release a fix. The network is currently awaiting finality.
During critical upgrades like this, client issues often arise on the testnet, and the client teams usually resolve synchronization errors before upgrading the mainnet.
To prepare for this transition, the development team chose a phased approach – first implementing the upgrade on different testnets. After the deployment on the Goerli testnet today, the next steps include launching Dencun on the Sepolia testnet on January 31st, upgrading on the Holesky testnet on February 7th, and finally implementing the mainnet upgrade by the end of the first quarter of 2024.
The key point of this Dencun deployment is the introduction of the Ethereum Improvement Proposal EIP-4844 – a new transaction mechanism known as “temporary blobs” or “proto-danksharding”. It allows Ethereum nodes to temporarily store and access off-chain data, reducing storage requirements. This is expected to significantly reduce transaction costs for Ethereum dApps, especially benefiting Layer 2 networks.
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