Ethereum
5 Things to Know About Ethereum’s Latest and Biggest Upgrade: Dencun
Dencun, Ethereum’s biggest upgrade since the network moved to proof-of-stake (PoS) 18 months ago, is set to go live tomorrow. Some developers have called this release cheap for crypto because of its implications for how users interact with decentralized applications on Ethereum’s secondary (layer 2) scaling platforms.
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In short, Dencun will change the way data is stored on Ethereum, making it significantly more accessible and also cheaper to record layer 2 transactions. There have already been lots of writing about Dencun (a portmanteau of two separate updates, Cancun and Deneb, representing nine distinct proposals for improving Ethereum) and there is a lot to say.
But this massive upgrade has been in the works for a while, meaning there are potentially many lesser-known details about how it came to be. Here’s what you need to know about how Dencun will affect you and how it happened:
Ethereum’s gasless era: Dencun will make L2 transactions very cheap – almost fee-free, to the point where almost all activity on Ethereum will be transferred to these networks. There may even be projects or protocols that will encourage usage by reducing the gas payments that users usually have to endure (this would be cheaper than paying for marketing!).
Important step: Dencun is Ethereum’s biggest upgrade since The Merge in September 2022, which moved the network from a purposefully inefficient proof-of-work algorithm to staking. This is also one of the steps towards Ethereum’s ultimate goal of being able to support hundreds of different rollups and secondary scaling layers, and one day process millions of transactions per second.
Long in the making: Dencun will present the process of Proto-Danksharding, something long theorized (it was first mentioned by Buterin in 2019) that is changing the way Ethereum stores data. Instead of keeping all data directly on the immutable execution layer of the Ethereum mainnet, which is expensive and computationally heavy, Dencun will introduce a new temporary way of storing “blobs” of data, which is cheaper . Blobs may seem like a silly term, but it’s actually a common concept in computing. Similar data management blobs exist in programming languages like Javascript and Python.
Etymology: Proto-Danksharding is named after two Ethereum researchers, Dankrad Feist and Proto Lambda, who proposed the change. This is fitting because Proto Danksharding is necessary for the full deployment of Danksharding – which is several years away and takes up the idea of further simplifying data storage. Additionally, although the term “sharding” is in the name, neither Danksharding nor Proto-Danksharding is a traditional way of “sharding” – or dividing – a database into smaller parts, as is known. in computer science, which was the original plan to get Ethereum. to scale. In a sense, Dencun’s introduction of Proto-Danksharding constitutes a serious departure from Ethereum’s original roadmap, chosen because it is easier to implement.
The biggest ceremony ever organized: The first step in establishing Proto-Danksharding took place in 2022 with the world’s largest “trust configuration” ceremony. Named after the researchers (Aniket Kate, Gregory M. Zaverucha and Ian Goldberg) who created a key component that makes Blob storage on Ethereum possible, tens of thousands of people participated in what is now called the Ceremony KZG, which was a way for the Ethereum community to collectively generate a secret random string of data necessary for proto-danksharding to work.