The Dencun upgrade on Ethereum estimated to take place next month will likely not go ahead as planned, with the majority of developers raising concerns about executing the hard fork at this stage.
In the latest scheduled meeting, Ethereum core developers confirmed that the Dencun upgrade would not be deployed by the end of this year, as initially planned.
Concerns about the timeline arose from the fact that the upgrade has not yet been introduced to Ethereum’s testnets such as Goerli, Sepolia, and Holesky.
In September, developers estimated that if Dencun couldn’t be deployed on testnet before the Devconnect conference (a weekly event connecting Ethereum developers) in mid-November, it would have to be postponed to the next year.
This week, Ethereum underwent the 10th closed testing phase, Devnet 10. However, the results seem to be below expectations. Developer Potuz noted that “none of the networks performed well.”
Devnet 11 is planned, but the transition to testnets may continue to be delayed after Devconnect as developers feel uncertain about bringing the entire client to testnet, believing that there are still significant adjustments in the system.
The activation of Dencun depends on factors such as the readiness of source code across consensus layers and Ethereum’s execution, as well as the readiness of many client teams – all of which need to be tested on public testnets and require a considerable amount of time for that testing process.
Dencun is the next significant upgrade for Ethereum, following Shanghai/Shapella deployed in April 2023. Dencun, a combination of Deneb and Cancun, was finalized in early June, introducing five major changes to Ethereum:
- EIP-4844 (Proto-Danksharding): Proposes splitting transaction data storage costs.
- EIP-4788: Enhancements to cross-chain bridge design and staking pools.
- EIP-5656: Updates to Ethereum Virtual Machine with minor changes.
- EIP-1153: Proposes changes to data storage structure in blocks.
- EIP-6780: Removes code snippets allowing smart contract cancellation.
