A year and a half after the release of the Ethereum update called Shapella, the dynamics of the ecosystem development showed a decline. Many analysts and crypto market participants called the activity in Ethereum – “disappointing”. As a result of Shapella, the daily number of transactions and the number of daily active addresses decreased by almost 20%.
To lift the network from its knees, Ethereum developers want to activate a hardfork called Dencun, which, according to them, will open up new opportunities for second-tier solutions and individual decentralized applications. In today’s post, we will briefly and simply talk about the upcoming Cancun-Deneb (Dencun) and find out what this hardfork may change.
What is Cancun-Deneb (Dencun)?
Cancun is a hardfork in the Ethereum blockchain consisting of two updates: consensus (Deneb) and execution (Cancun).
Dencun should cover several areas at once: scalability, lower gas fees (we hear this year after year – but nothing changes), improved security, and optimized data storage. According to the developers, it is Dencun that will act as a kind of preparatory stage for the transition to sharding.
In turn, Cancun will implement the following suggestions for improving the blockchain:
- EIP-4844 is the long-awaited Ethereum upgrade that includes a Proto-Danksharding option designed to scale the blockchain by creating a new type of transaction for huge data sets. As part of this upgrade, fees will be reduced for L2 solutions based on Rollups.
- EIP-4788 – an upgrade to improve the efficiency of crosschain bridges and steak pools.
- EIP-1153 – Upgrade to optimize blockchain space and reduce onchain data storage fees;
- EIP-5656 – upgrade to improve EVM virtual machine performance;
- EIP-6780 – upgrade to remove some of the old code that may interfere with the new smart contracts.
Initially Ethereum team wanted to activate Dencun in October 2023, but due to the huge number of problems in testnet, the upgrade has been postponed to 2024.
The exact date of Cancun-Deneb (Dencun) is not disclosed.
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