Ethereum has reached yet another major milestone as core developers of the blockchain successfully activated the dencun upgrade on its mainnet.
The much-anticipated upgrade went live on the Ethereum mainnet on March 13, 2024, at epoch 269568, marking a huge overhaul in the leading blockchain ecosystem.
Tim Beiko of the Ethereum Foundation announced the positive development on X (Twitter), noting that dencun upgrade went smoothly despite being the most complex fork on the network since the Merge.
The Merge upgrade, which transitioned the largest smart contract-enabled blockchain from proof of work (PoW) to proof to stake (PoS) occurred in September 2022. The Shapella upgrade followed in April 2023, enabling validators to withdraw their stake from the Beacon Chain back to the execution layer.
Parithosh, a DevOps at the Ethereum Foundation also commented on the Wednesday upgrade, sharing a “healthy” statistics of blob propagation at that time. Also, he concurred that “the dencun fork was finalized without issues and the network has been running stably since then.”
Moreover, the founder of ETHGlobal and a contributor at Optimism Liam Horne said dencun was beyond a tech upgrade. According to Horne, it marked a substantial shift in how Ethereum core developers operate given they collaborated with L2 core devs, research and client teams to activate the proto-danksharding upgrade.
What To Expect Post-Dencun Upgrade
As earlier reported by Nitadel, the upgrade introduces several modifications to Ethereum and other blockchains built on it. Primarily, the dencun fork would help lower transaction fees on Ethereum layer 2s through the introduction of the so-called blobs.
Blobs are temporary memory elements of 32 bytes each, designed to carry data about transactions. They are stored for approximately 18 days only before being pruned.
Reports show that the reduction in Ethereum L2 gas fees took effect shortly after the upgrade. Notably, fees on Starknet have dropped by about 99% as reported by top wallet service provider Argent X and other Starknet users. “$0.04 for an in-app swap on Argent X; a couple of days ago, it was $6.82,” ArgentHQ tweeted. “Just paid 0.06$ for a swap when gas is 64 Gwei,“ another Starknet user commented.
With gas fees on Ethereum layer 2s now greatly reduced, these blockchains are bound to record increased adoption from users and developers. In other words, high transaction fees are a significant blocker for new users and applications.
Therefore, the dencun upgrade is expected to foster a significant shift to rollups. The anticipated development could positively impact the prices of L2 native tokens with ETH edging closer to setting a new all-time high above $4,868.
