Ethereum Dencun Upgrade Scheduled For March 13: All You Need To Know

Ethereum developers are set to implement the Dencun upgrade on the largest smart contracts-enabled blockchain, a few months after executing the Shapella upgrade. 

Scheduled for activation at slot number 8626176, the highly-anticipated mainnet upgrade is expected to occur on March 13, 2024, per an update from Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko.

Ahead of its execution on the Ethereum mainnet, Dencun has been successfully implemented on the network’s popular testnets — Goerli, Sepolia and Holesky.

Notably, Dencun went live on Goerli on January 17, 2024. While it was activated on Sepolia at epoch 132608 on January 30, the upgrade was executed on Holesky at epoch 29696 on February 7, 2024. 

Ethereum Dencun Upgrade Upsides

The Dencun upgrade is designed to introduce several technical enhancements which are forward-compatible with Ethereum’s scaling roadmap. These include transient storage (EIP-1153) and temporary data blobs also known as protodanksharding (EIP-4844) amongst others. 

In other words, the upcoming upgrade —through EIP-4844— will onboard a novel transaction type to Ethereum which accepts the so-called “blobs” of data to be persisted in the beacon node for a short period, according to the project developers. 

Combining changes to both Ethereum’s consensus and execution layers, the Dencun upgrade is expected to reduce transaction fees on layer-2 networks. Hence, facilitating an ecosystem-wide move to rollups and enabling Ethereum to remain competitive without giving up its decentralization.

Impact on ETH Price

Bullish sentiments and investor interest in ETH have continued to rise ahead of the Dencun upgrade. In particular, the Ethereum native token has been among the top-performing cryptocurrencies in the past week, posting a price gain of over 15%. 

Changing hands at $2,640 at the time of writing, ETH surpassed the $2,700 level for the first time since May 2022 on Monday. As the highly-awaited upgrade approaches, coupled with the broader crypto market recovery, several crypto analysts predict a sustained bullish run for ETH. 

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