Ethereum Blobs: Launch Date, Details of Dencun Upgrade Element

The highly anticipated Ethereum Dencun upgrade that will introduce proto-danksharding and blob-carrying transactions is now scheduled for 13 March 2024.

Dencun upgrade weeks away

As per a bi-weekly coordination call between Ethereum core developers, the target date for the long-awaited Dencun update is now set to occur at slot 8626176, or precisely at 13:55 UTC,13 March 2024. The decision comes just a day after Dencun was successfully implemented on the Holesky testnet.

The upgrade will be the first major step towards Ethereum’s ultimate end goal, danksharding, a scaling solution that if achieved, will see the Ethereum network able to process over 100,000 transactions per second (TPS), as well as an overall increased efficiency, lower costs, and greater potential for innovation.

Since it’s inception, Ethereum has tirelessly worked to address issues of scalability and costs in a bid to further adoption of crypto, blockchain, and Web3 technologies overall. Despite the bottlenecks, Ethereum remains the destination of choice for a majority of Web3 developers and users, giving every incremental upgrade an added sense of importance for the community.

EIP-4844 and proto-danksharding

The Dencun upgrade is a pivotal development that is focused on successfully implementing proto-danksharding, a means of changing how Layer-2 networks and rollups manage data.

With the introduction of blob-carrying transactions, a larger amount of data can be temporarily attached to a transaction. Data blobs are a mechanism for temporarily hosting large amounts of off-chain data, which serves to alleviate the burden on Ethereum nodes. 

Layer-2 rollups can leverage this extra storage space for processing data, which gives them a more economical, efficient, and scalable means of handling data, which increases overall throughput and reduces costs.

Initially touted to go live on the mainnet in October 2023, the road to proto-danksharding has been one of rigorous and meticulous testing. The Dencun mainnet debut was preceded by deployments onto the Goerli and Sepolia testnets, which served to give developers a controlled environment through which they could vet and refine the upgrade. 

Given the scale of the upgrade, a thorough testing period that can mitigate unforeseen consequences that will impact the mainnet where funds, assets, and much more are at stake.

Ethereum (ETH) price

With the overall crypto market enjoying a healthy upward trajectory, the ETH token has received an extra boost on the back of the 13 March 2024 upgrade date, with investors now seemingly getting in on ETH before then.

As per the data available from CoinMarketCap, ETH is trading at $2,673, up 7.6% in the last 24-hour period.