Ethereum’s Dencun Upgrade Activates on Mainnet

Ethereum’s core developers have successfully implemented the Dencun upgrade on the mainnet, ushering in the era of “blobs” that are poised to significantly reduce transaction costs for Layer 2 transactions.

The activation of the upgrade, including the EIP-4844, occurred on the network at epoch 269568, around 10 am ET.

With the implementation of Dencun, Ethereum Layer 2 rollups can now utilize blobs instead of the traditional “calldata” method for posting transactions. This change offers a direct avenue for reducing fees and passing on these savings to end users.

Blobs represent a major enhancement to Ethereum’s infrastructure, aiming to improve data availability without disrupting the current framework. By doing so, they help decrease transaction costs on Layer 2 solutions such as Base, Optimism, Arbitrum One, zkSync, Starknet, and others. A dedicated fee market for blobs will strive to maintain low transaction costs for Layer 2 networks, even during periods of high network congestion.

While some Layer 2 chains are planning to integrate blobs immediately, others may take some time to adopt this new feature.

Additional Improvements Introduced by Dencun

In addition to EIP-4844, the Dencun upgrade brings eight other code updates to the Ethereum network.

One notable improvement is EIP-4788, which introduces an “enshrined oracle” to facilitate communication between Ethereum’s execution layer and consensus layer.

Another significant enhancement is EIP-1153, which focuses on “transient storage,” a critical feature necessary for the launch of Uniswap version 4 later this year.