Ether On Cusp Of Major Bullish Boost As Landmark Dencun Upgrade Gets Official Target Date

After successfully completing a string of test runs, Ethereum developers have decided on a deployment date for the much-anticipated Dencun upgrade aimed at reducing layer-2 transaction fees.

Dencun Mainnet Launch Scheduled For March 13

Proto-danksharding is just around the corner.

Ethereum’s core developers announced Thursday during an AllCoreDevs call that they intend to implement the network’s long-awaited Dencun upgrade on or around March 13.

Dencun will introduce the much-touted proto-danksharding feature via Ethereum Improvement Proposal-4844. Proto-danksharding promises to lower costs for transactions on layer-2 networks built on top of Ethereum by introducing “blob” transactions and transient storage.

Blobs are coming to mainnet at slot 8626176 .oO

— timbeiko.eth (@TimBeiko) February 8, 2024

The decision for the deployment date was communicated just a day after Dencun reached the final Holesky testnet without any hiccups. Before Holesky, Dencun went live on the Goerli and Sepolia testnets on Jan. 17 and Jan. 30, respectively.

Ether’s Bullish Prospects

Dencun is primed to be the most significant upgrade of Ethereum since the Shanghai upgrade in April 2023, which allowed ether (ETH) stakers to withdraw funds from the Beacon Chain for the first time since the PoS chain went live in early December 2020.

Although Ethereum has long been the leader in decentralized applications and non-fungible tokens, the network has been beleaguered by exorbitant gas prices and slow transaction speeds. Layer-2 scaling solutions such as Optimism, Arbitrum, and zkSync dodged those issues by building atop the Ethereum blockchain, but “rolling up” batches of transactions into a single one. Proto-danksharding will make layer-2s even more scalable and inexpensive.

Developers project that the Ethereum network will be able to handle more than 100,000 transactions per second, and on the cheap, after Danksharding’s full rollout.

From a bullish perspective, the Dencun hard fork and potential spot ether exchange-traded funds (ETFs) present an opportunity for ETH to head toward $3,000 and beyond. The second-largest crypto was recently changing hands at $2,487.73, alongside Bitcoin’s surge above $47K.