After Ethereum completed the Shanghai upgrade in mid-April, validators were able to withdraw the long-staked ETH from the beacon chain. Ethereum developers then began preparing for the next major upgrade, the Dencun upgrade. The main proposal EIP-4844 in the Cancun upgrade will make the Ethereum network more scalable, and some of the upgrade content can also further reduce transaction fees and network congestion.

The word Dencun is a compound word composed of Cancun and Deneb. In this upgrade, the Cancun upgrade takes place at the Ethereum execution layer, which includes changes to all protocol rules. On the other hand, the consensus layer responsible for block verification will independently perform its own fork. This part of the upgrade is called Deneb, so it is collectively called Dencun.

Cancun upgrade expected to start in January

In June of this year, Ethereum core developers originally expected that the Dencun upgrade would be launched before the end of this year, but Ethereum developers confirmed in October that due to some problems during the test upgrade process, the Cancun upgrade could not be implemented before the end of 2023. However, it is now reported that there is finally good news about the Cancun upgrade.

According to Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko, at the Ethereum Executive Core Developer Meeting (ACDE) held on the 7th, the status of the Cancun upgrade, the testnet schedule, and how to plan the next network upgrade were discussed.

The meeting minutes show that Devnet#12launched the Cancun upgrade last week. Currently, almost all clients have been running tests on Devnet #12, including clients such as Reth and Lighthouse. Some errors have also been found and fixed. The Prysm Ethereum Client development team is the only team that has not yet joined the Devnet#12test and is expected to join in the next one or two weeks.

More importantly, Tim Beiko mentioned that the developers are ready for the testnet fork upgrade and plan to conduct a large-scale Goerli shadow fork in the next few weeks. Assuming everything goes well, the developers expect to set the fork date of the Goerli testnet early next year and plan to launch the Dencun upgrade on the network in January next year.

Goerli is the testnet with the highest number of participants and network load, second only to the Ethereum mainnet. Therefore, launching the Dencun upgrade on Goerli means that the official launch of the Dencun upgrade on the Ethereum mainnet is getting closer.

Ethereum and Layer2 rose on the news

After the news came out, Ethereum and Layer 2 tokens generally rose.

A review of Ethereum's historical upgrades

Ethereum is positioned as a world computer. To achieve this goal, Vitalik planned an upgrade roadmap for Ethereum at the beginning of its birth, which are: Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, Serenity.

At present, Ethereum has gone through the first two stages and part of the third stage, and has experienced 24 milestone events, most of which are fork upgrades. The more important ones are:

● 2015.7.30, Frontier Upgrade. Ethereum released its first barebones version (Beta version) for developers. At this time, Ethereum was like the development of the American West, full of huge risks and opportunities.

● 2016.3.14, Homeland Upgrade. Ethereum released its second major version. At this time, the first batch of “gold diggers” had completed the development of the “frontier” and entered the stage of homeland construction and living and working in peace and contentment.

● On July 20, 2016, The DAO was attacked, triggering a hard fork. This was not a normal upgrade, but a compromise that Ethereum was forced to make in its darkest hour, which led to the separation of the ETH and ETC chains.

● 2017.10.16, Byzantium upgrade. The "Metropolis" upgrade has a lot of content. It was originally planned to be split into two upgrades, Byzantium and Constantinople. Later, it was split into Istanbul, Berlin, London, etc. upgrades.

● 2019.2.28, Constantinople/Saint Petersburg upgrade. The originally planned Constantinople upgrade was postponed due to a security vulnerability. Two years later, Ethereum simultaneously carried out two upgrades, namely Constantinople and Saint Petersburg.

● 2020.1.2, Muir Glacier upgrade. Due to an error in estimating the "explosion" time of the mining difficulty bomb, it may "explode" ahead of time, so an emergency temporary upgrade was carried out.

● 2021.4.15, Berlin upgrade. This was the first upgrade named after the city where the Ethereum Developer Conference (Devcon) was held, and the tradition has continued since then.

● 2021.8.5, London upgrade. EIP-1559, which has a far-reaching impact on Ethereum, was released, allowing part of the gas fee to be burned.

● 2022.9.15, Paris Upgrade (The Merge). Ethereum officially completed the transition from Pow to PoS consensus.

● 2023.4.12, Shanghai upgrade. Mainly solved the withdrawal problem of ETH pledge.

●The Cancun upgrade is expected to be launched in January, which will focus on solving the Ethereum expansion problem.

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