Ethereum Dencun Headed to Mainnet After Acing Final Test

• The Ethereum Dencun upgrade has gone live on Holesky.
• With the successful Holesky launch, the upgrade will go live on the mainnet next.
• The Dencun upgrade represents the first step in the Ethereum sharding vision.

After over a year of anticipation, the Ethereum Dencun upgrade is closer than ever. Following successful launches on Goerli and Sepolia , the upgrade has made it through the final Ethereum testnet.

Ethereum Dencun Smoothly Chugs Through Holesky 

On Wednesday, February 7, the Dencun upgrade completed its journey across Ethereum’s major testnets after it went live on Holesky , the network’s largest sandbox for protocol-level changes and Goerli’s proposed replacement.

Despite an estimated 5% drop in validator participation, the upgrade was finalized with no issues on Holesky, extending the Dencun upgrade’s streak of smooth launches. 

With testing complete, all roads now lead to the Ethereum mainnet.

Wen Ethereum Dencun on Mainnet?

Following the successful launch of the Dencun on Holesky, developers are scheduled to set a date for the upgrade’s launch on the Ethereum mainnet during a consensus layer call on Thursday, February 8. Many expect them to fix the date between the end of February and the beginning of March 2024.

The upgrade will usher in EIP-4844 (proto-danksharding), the first of many upgrades geared towards addressing Ethereum’s scaling issues by splitting the network into smaller pieces called shards that run in parallel. 

This first upgrade, however, introduces some of the changes needed for this endgame vision without sharding the network. It also introduces blobs that promise to help Layer 2 chains save on Ethereum data storage costs.

On the Flipside 

• Layer 2 networks still have to implement separate upgrades to benefit from the introduction of blobs.
• Developers maintain that the full sharding vision is still years away.

Why This Matters

Following the successful launch of Dencun on Holesky, the long wait for the upgrade to make it to the Ethereum mainnet is finally at an end.

Read this for more on Dencun:
Ethereum Dencun Only One Step Away After Smooth Sepolia Fork

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