Ethereum Mainnet Dencun Upgrade Set for Launch on March 13

Reported by Cointelegraph, the Dencun upgrade has now been set for launch on the Ethereum mainnet on March 13 — introducing proto-danksharding and blobs aimed at driving down transaction costs on Ethereum layer-2s.

The hard fork is scheduled to take place at 13:55:35 pm UTC, Ethereum infrastructure firm Nethermind revealed in a Feb. 8 X post. The timing equates to approximately slot 8626176 on the Ethereum network, Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko added.

Proto-danksharding is a sharding design which implements “blob-carrying transactions” to create more block space on Ethereum layer-2s.

Blob-carrying transactions are like normal transactions except that it carries an extra piece of data.

Proto-danksharding will limit the number of blobs in each block to 16, with each being no larger than 128 KB, according to Blocknative. It is expected to add about 2 MB of block space.

Both optimistic and zero-knowledge rollups will be able to leverage the extra data space to post commitments to transaction data on-chain and make the actual data available in data blobs instead of calldata.

A successful implementation of Dencun on the Ethereum mainnet could even lower rollup costs by up to 10 times, according to Philippe Schommers, head of infrastructure at Gnosis.