Ethereum Dencun upgrade mainnet activation date is initially expected to be March 13

Christine Kim, Vice President of Research at Galaxy, summarized the 181st Ethereum Core Developer Execution (ACDE) conference call. The developers shared the latest updates on their preparations for activating the main network upgrade for Dencun, and discussed various Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs).

Most of the proposed changes are included in the Pectra upgrade, while other proposals are proposed as "retrospective" EIPs, which means that changes to protocol rules will be applied retrospectively to all Ethereum transactions since its inception.

Barnabas Busa, a development and operations engineer at the Ethereum Foundation, said his team is synchronizing nodes to the Ethereum main network in preparation for a shadow fork. Developers plan to execute the Ethereum main network shadow fork to upgrade Dencun after all final client versions for Dencun are released.

The client team plans to release the final version of Dencun later next week. Busa said his team will upgrade their nodes to these versions shortly thereafter, and plan to complete the main network shadow fork by February 23 (Friday). Once the results of the shadow fork are out and positive, he will continue to publish official EF blog posts announcing the main network activation date for the Dencun upgrade as March 13.