The Ethereum blockchain team will conduct the Dencun hard fork in the testnets during the first two months of 2024.
According to a statement from the project’s team lead, Tim Beiko, if “everything goes as planned,” deployments are expected to follow this schedule:
– January 17th in Goerli.
– January 30th in Sepolia.
– February 7th in Holesky.
“Obviously, if we find a serious issue or something crazy earlier, we can always cancel [the process]. Ideally, we’ll publish a blog post about the fork sometime within the week of January 8th, so people have at least a week to upgrade,” Beiko added.
Following a successful launch in the testnets, the Dencun upgrade will be implemented in the main network around the end of February.
Originally, the hard fork was scheduled for the last quarter of 2023, but developers postponed it to the following year, citing persistent consensus issues.
Dencun is an upgrade that implements EIP-4844. It includes the Proto-Danksharding option designed to scale the network by introducing a new transaction type for large binary data arrays. It is expected to reduce transaction fees for L2 solutions based on Rollups.
The hard fork involves a restructuring of consensus (Deneb) and execution (Cancun) layers.
In September, the Holesky testnet was launched, intended to replace Goerli. The testnet is set to play a crucial role in the implementation of Dencun, providing more rigorous conditions for testing the upgrade.
