Ethereum developers have confirmed the deployment date for the Dencun (Deneb-Cancun) upgrade on the mainnet as March 13.
The hard fork will occur when the blockchain reaches slot 8,626,176.
Blobs are coming to mainnet at slot 8626176 .oO
— timbeiko.eth ☀️ (@TimBeiko) February 8, 2024
Initially, the upgrade was planned for late 2023. However, due to technical delays, the hard fork was postponed to early 2024.
A key component of the upgrade is EIP-4844, which includes the Proto-Danksharding option. This is designed to scale the network by creating a new type of transaction for large binary data arrays (BLOB). It is expected to reduce fees for L2 solutions based on Rollups technology by approximately tenfold.
Earlier in February, the Ethereum team successfully implemented Dencun on the Holesky test network.
On January 17, the activation of Dencun on the Goerli testnet (for the consensus layer, like Holesky) resulted in a network fork. Developers resolved the issue within approximately four hours.
The deployment of the upgrade (execution layer) on Sepolia on January 31 proceeded smoothly.