Ethereum Developers Gear Up for Dencun Upgrade, Targets January 17

• Dencun was delayed from its planned objective of the fourth quarter of 2023 to 2024.
• After Shapella earlier this year, Dencun would be the first big improvement.

Developers working on Ethereum are ramping up testing for the Dencun upgrade, a big milestone due next year that would increase data storage capacity using a new method called “proto-danksharding.”

During their biweekly call on Thursday, the developers covered a lot of ground, including their plans to upgrade the Goerli test network (testnet) to Dencun—the long-awaited upgrade that will enable “proto-danksharding”—by January 17th. This upgrade will scale the blockchain through boosting space for “blobs” of data and lower fees for layer 2 rollups.

Tim Beiko, protocol support lead at the Ethereum Foundation stated:

“Obviously if we find a major issue or something crazy before then we can always cancel. This would mean ideally we’re putting out the blog post for the fork sometime during the week of Jan.uary 8th, so people have at least a week to update.”

Major Improvement

Due to the technical complexity of the modification, Dencun was delayed from its planned objective of the fourth quarter of 2023 to 2024.

In addition, developers deliberated on a preliminary schedule for the Dencun testing upgrade, with the goal of completing the update on Jan. 31, the Holesky testnet on Feb. 7, and the mainnet near the end of February. Also, they warned that the results of the testnet forks might cause these dates to alter.

After Shapella, which allowed staked ether (ETH) withdrawals from the blockchain earlier this year, Dencun would be the first big improvement. Ethereum price has been witnessing a bullish momentum as investors are optimistic over the anticipated approval of a spot Bitcoin ETF in January next year.

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