Ethereum Developers Target January 17 for Dencun Upgrade Testing on Goerli Testnet

According to CoinDesk, Ethereum developers are accelerating their testing process for the upcoming Dencun upgrade, a significant milestone expected next year that will add data storage capacity through a new method called 'proto-danksharding.' During a biweekly call on Thursday, the developers mentioned that they are aiming for January 17 to run the Goerli test network (testnet) through Dencun, the highly anticipated upgrade that will enable 'proto-danksharding,' which lowers fees for layer 2 rollups and scales the blockchain by increasing space for 'blobs' of data. Tim Beiko, protocol support lead at the Ethereum Foundation, said on the call that they could always cancel if they find a major issue or something unexpected before then. Ideally, they plan to release the blog post for the fork during the week of January 8th, giving people at least a week to update.

Dencun was initially scheduled for the last quarter of 2023, but the developers postponed it to 2024 due to the engineering complexities of the upgrade. The developers also discussed a draft timeline for the Dencun testing upgrade, aiming to run through another test network, Sepolia, on January 31, the Holesky testnet on February 7, and then moving forward to deploy the changes on the mainnet around the end of February. They warned that these dates could change depending on the outcome of the testnet forks. Dencun will be the first major upgrade since Shapella earlier this year, which allowed staked ether (ETH) withdrawals from the blockchain.