Long-Awaited Ethernet Upgrade Gets Closer as Developers Finalize Timeline

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Dencun is coming according to its developers, and Ether will be a lot cheaper as a result.

A blog post published yesterday by the Ether Foundation confirms that the next two steps of the long-awaited upgrade (i.e. Sepolia and Holesky testnet) will be completed early next month.Litecoin DOGE mining

This means that the upgrade should go live on the main network in March.

The post reads, “Assuming the Sepolia and Holesky upgrades go smoothly, Dencun will be on the main EtherNet next.” It added that Sepolia will be upgraded on January 30th, while Holesky will be completed on February 7th on the test network.

The developers promise that these incremental steps are among the final steps needed to make Ether faster and cheaper.

Ether is the blockchain behind ETH, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, and is notorious for clogging up its network.

It’s become difficult and expensive for people who want to use it to build apps or send money.

But the folks behind the technology say the latest upgrade will address the network’s scalability issues.Bitmain Miner

One feature of the upgrade is called “proto-danksharding” (or EIP-4844), which means the network will be able to process more than 100,000 transactions per second at a fraction of the cost.

The developers say it will do this by making Layer 2 Ethernet solutions, such as Optimism, cheaper.

A report published in October by market intelligence firm Messari said that Layer 2 solutions on Ether are where most of the activity on Ether happens. They run in parallel with the main network, so transactions can essentially bypass Ethernet’s blockchain quickly.

Ether is constantly improving. Most notably, in 2022, the network moves from proof-of-work to proof-of-equity, a widely publicized upgrade known as “merging”.