Ethereum was suppose to have another upgrade to its blockchain this year but those plans seem like they simply are not going to happen now. In this article I'm going to go over quickly what happened to the upgrade, issues and errors found and what Dencun will ultimately bring to the Ethereum blockchain with this latest update now expected early 2024.
Ethereum blockchain upgrades like this require a hard fork which you don't hear about all too often anymore. A hard fork is where the chain can split if not everyone upgrades to the latest chain version. We saw this in the biggest case with the creation of Ethereum classic which was said to be Beta to the new version.
The way these hard forks happen is a lot of development work and testing is done on smaller test nets or devnets which ran into major issues with the consistent consensus.
There seems to be a division between Ethereum clients. One focusing on the execution layer and the other on the consensus layer. We can see this in the recent naming of of the Dencun. The consensus teams adopting city names while execution client developers choose star names.
Dencun is the first move towards scalability for the Ethereum blockchain. Something that has been a major issue for Ethereum during the last two bull runs. This is when moments of Layer2 blockchains helped to some extent the high fees but it was clear everyone still wanted Ethereum itself keeping fees well above what they should be. It still hovers just under $1 per transaction which is still high when doing smaller micro transactions or wanting to sell or defi things of $50 or less.
The Dencun upgrade will implement what is known as "rollups" and help optimize gas fees. These layer 2 rollsup will help improve the connection between layer two tokens such as Polygon(MATIC) and allow for less hitting of the main net while still computing massive amounts of transactions.
The other part of it will be what is known as proto-danksharding which is a term that has been tossed around for about 5 years now. The thought of sharding the network and running mini nodes to deal with transactions and then post that data up to the main chain.
It's apparent that a majority of nodes that run Ethereum seem to be running on Amazon AWS servers. It's one of the biggest concerns for Ethereum and for many that use the network and most likely will become a focal point before other upgrades happen to scaling.
"Vitalik Buterin" was said to be focusing on this area and wants to get nodes as fresh and smooth running as possible that it could be done right on your phone if one choose to do so.
It's once again a rather large update and doesn't really improve anything at all other then layer 2 tokens for right now and setting up the possibility for Ethereum to really be able to scale on its own. These scaling solutions are going to want to be figured out before the next bull run otherwise Ethereum will once again find itself struggling to process and advance mass transactions without a $50 fee to pay.
