Ethereum Developers Activate Dencun Hard Fork on Mainnet

On March 13, the Ethereum team successfully implemented the Dencun (Deneb-Cancun) upgrade on the mainnet.

Dencun went live, we’ve had blobs land in blocks on mainnet .oO ?

— timbeiko.eth ☀️ (@TimBeiko) March 13, 2024

A key component of the upgrade is EIP-4844. It includes the Proto-Danksharding option, aimed at scaling the network by creating a new type of transaction for large binary data arrays (BLOB).

This is expected to significantly reduce fees for L2 solutions, particularly those based on Rollup technology.

According to experts at IntoTheBlock, Arbitrum’s swap transaction fee is expected to decrease from $2.02 to $0.4, Optimism’s from $1.42 to $0.28, and Base’s will drop to $0.01.

After the Ethereum Dencun upgrade this week, EIP-4844 will reduce L2 gas fees. According to IntoTheBlock statistics, for a DEX swap, the gas fee for Aribitrum will be reduced from $2.02 to $0.4, Optimism will be reduced from $1.42 to $0.28, Base will be reduced from $0.58 to… pic.twitter.com/0x6jGDYF5z

— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) March 11, 2024

Similar expectations from the upgrade were expressed by the Polygon team, confirming that rollups like zkEVM, Linea, Scroll, and zkSync will benefit the most.

On January 17, the activation of Dencun on the Goerli testnet (consensus layer) led to a fork in the network. Developers resolved the issue in about four hours.

The deployment of the upgrade on Sepolia (execution layer) on January 31 went smoothly. On March 7, the implementation on Holesky (launched in 2023 to replace Goerli) also encountered no issues.

The following day, during a weekly call, the team confirmed the date for the hard fork activation on the mainnet.

According to Grayscale experts, the launch of Dencun will help Ethereum “mature” by increasing the network’s scalability.