Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade goes live on Sepolia testnet
Quick Take
- The upgrade, when deployed on the mainnet in the future, is expected to significantly lower fees and increase scalability.
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’s latest major upgrade Dencun went live on the Sepolia test network on Tuesday, leaving just one more testnet before its anticipated “proto-danksharding” feature comes to fruition.
Dencun deployment on Sepolia commenced at 22:51 UTC Tuesday and was finalized soon after. “Blobs are now flowing in Sepolia,” Parithosh Jayanthi, DevOps engineer at the Ethereum Foundation, wrote in a post on X. “Uneventful testnet forks are the best ones!”
Ethereum core developers deployed the upgrade on the Goerli testnet earlier this month. The upgrade’s initiation on the third and final testnet Holesky is scheduled for Feb. 7. Following a third successful testnet deployment, the Ethereum team is expected to establish a mainnet launch date for Dencun.
One anticipated feature Dencun is set to bring is proto-danksharding, which aims to lower gas fees and improve scalability by introducing a new, compressed data storage mechanism called “blobs.”
“A blob-carrying transaction is like a regular transaction, except it also carries an extra piece of data called a blob,” Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin wrote in a community explainer. “Blobs are extremely large (~125 kB), and can be much cheaper than similar amounts of calldata.”
Ethereum’s last major upgrade, Shapella, took place in March 2023, which enabled users and validators to withdraw their staked ETH on the network.
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