There is new progress in Ethereum's "Cancun Upgrade": On December 8, 2023, at the 176th meeting of the Ethereum Foundation, developers unanimously agreed that if things go well, the Goerli fork date will be set in early 2024, with the goal of activating the Goerli Dencun testnet in January 2024.

As for the specific time when Ethereum's "Cancun Upgrade" will be completed, based on industry insiders' speculation on the current progress of protocol development and testing completion, it is expected that the upgrade will be officially implemented between March and April 2024.

Focus on the primary and secondary markets of the cryptocurrency circle. Dedicated to researching primary skyrocketing currencies and secondary high-quality potential currencies. V: wu354133 No threshold, no fees, no exchanges, no trading links.

The significance of Ethereum's "Cancun Upgrade" is no less than that of the "Shapella Upgrade" - because this upgrade is the key to Ethereum's further expansion, it can increase the number of transactions that the Ethereum network can respond to per second, and will also open a new stage of development in Ethereum's data storage and retrieval capabilities.

For blockchain users who hold digital assets, the most intuitive change that Ethereum’s “Cancun Upgrade” will bring to digital asset transactions is that the Gas fees required for digital asset transactions on the Ethereum Layer 2 network will be significantly reduced. , the decline may reach 14 times.

imToken now supports all Layer2 networks and EVM-compatible chains on Ethereum. After the "Cancun Upgrade" is completed, users holding digital assets can experience asset transactions on the Ethereum Layer2 network with higher cost-effectiveness and cheaper gas fees through imToken. In addition, imToken supports OP and Polygon, and directly using the Swap function of imToken can also enjoy relatively lower network operation fees.

For blockchain developers, it should be noted that after the Ethereum "Cancun Upgrade" is officially implemented in 2024, the Goerli test network will no longer be used. Developers are advised to migrate to the Sepolia test network as soon as possible.

imToken now fully supports the Sepolia test network and supports the claim of test assets on the Sepolia test network through the "faucet" entrance.

Learn about Cancun Plus

Cancun is a famous tourist city in Mexico and the venue for the Devcon 3 conference. According to the naming rules of Ethereum upgrades, the upgrade named after the place name is an upgrade to the Ethereum execution layer.
The Ethereum consensus layer upgrade synchronized with the "Cancun Upgrade" is codenamed Deneb. Therefore, the official name of the complete version of the execution layer and protocol layer of this Ethereum upgrade has been determined to be "Dencun Upgrade". Dencun is a compound word of Cancun + Deneb.
The following are the improvement protocols (EIPs) that deserve special attention in the "Cancun Upgrade". Let us take a look at them together.

01

The protagonist of the "Cancun Upgrade": EIP-4844

Prototype of Ethereum sharding

▶ Improvement goals: Solve the scalability of Ethereum (i.e., expansion requirements), help reduce the transaction costs of Ethereum's Layer 2 (Layer2) Rollups solution, and increase the speed of Rollups.

▶ Improvement background: The fees of Ethereum's Layer 1 mainnet have remained high, and necessary improvements are urgently needed to reduce overall operating costs.

Currently, the scaling solution on Ethereum is mainly Layer 2 Rollups.

In practice, the Rollups solution helps users save a lot of operating fees (hereinafter referred to as Gas Fee). For example, the representative project Optimism has a regular Gas Fee of only 0.001 gwei, which is much lower than the regular cost of Ethereum's Layer 1 mainnet. The ZK Rollups solution has better data compression performance and does not need to include signature data, so the fee is lower and can even be reduced to one percent of the Ethereum Layer 1 mainnet.

However, for a wider range of users, even after the Rollups solution, Gas fees are still a relatively expensive burden. In addition, Ethereum's efficiency in processing parallel transactions is still low, and it can only process double-digit transactions per second at most. These require new improvements to help improve scalability.

Sharding is a powerful improvement method to solve the above problems, but it cannot be implemented on Ethereum now. The timely proposal of the improvement plan EIP-4844 is to find a balance between solving the above needs and implementing sharding upgrades, which can be applied to Ethereum at this stage, and lays the early technical foundation for Ethereum to realize overall data sharding in the future.

Therefore, EIP-4844 was once called "Proto-danksharding", which means "prototype of sharding". The word dank also has a special origin. It is taken from the name of Ethereum researcher Dankrad Feist, who once said: "EIP-4844 will become an accelerator for Rollups."

At present, in order to more intuitively display the technical improvements of EIP-4844, the title of the EIP-4844 improvement protocol has been uniformly described as "Shard Blob Transactions", that is, "Shard Blob Transactions".

▶ Improvements (Completed technical improvements):

· Introducing Blob transactions: Blob is short for Binary Large Object. Blob transactions are a new transaction type that will be used in future sharding. · Introducing all execution layer logic required to implement future full sharding. · Introducing all execution layer and consensus layer cross-validation logic required to implement future full sharding. · Implementing stratification between beacon block validation (i.e. Ethereum layer 2 data) and blob data availability sampling. · Introducing most of the logic required for beacon blocks to implement future full sharding.

▶ Notes: Blob was originally designed to help carry Ethereum Layer 2 data. At the same time, Blob, a set of data vectors, is stored by the nodes of the Ethereum consensus layer and cannot be read by the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) of the execution layer. It is this separation of data that reduces the cost of Ethereum's Layer 2 Rollups solution. In addition, Blob data will be deleted after 18 days. In order to reduce the pressure on the main network caused by improvement proposals, EIP-4844 sets an upper limit on the storage space increased by each beacon block compared to the implementation of full sharding in the future, which is limited to a data size of about 0.5 MB (about 4 blobs), but this upper limit is expected to increase in the future. Impact of EIP-4844 on the Maximum Transactions Per Second (Max TPS) of the Blockchain
Network Before EIP-4844 implementation After EIP-4844 implementation
Optimism455637
Decision One226316.4
zkSync Era750750
Ethereum1313△  Data updated on 2023/12/11  Impact of EIP-4844 on asset transaction gas fees
Network Before EIP-4844 implementation After EIP-4844 implementation
Send SwapSend Swap 
Optimism$0.11$0.22$0.00788$0.02
Decision One $0.17 $0.48 $0.01214 $0.034
zkSync Era$0.10-$0.00714-
Ethereum$1.56$7.78$1.56$7.78△ Data source: I2fees.info, statistics on 2023/12/802 "Cancun Upgrade" confirmed the implementation of the improvement proposals: · EIP-4844· · EIP-1153 · · EIP-6780· · EIP-4788· · EIP-5656 · · EIP-7516· In addition to the highly anticipated proposal EIP-4844 mentioned above, as of December 8, 2023, the "Cancun Upgrade" has confirmed that the improvement proposals being implemented also include: ▶ EIP-1153 "Transient Storage Opcodes": Add transient storage opcodes. Transient storage is a solution specifically designed to solve internal communication within the block. Transient storage does not change the semantics of existing operations. Transiently stored data will be discarded after each transaction, and the server disk will not be accessed. There is no need to clear the storage slot after use, and the client does not need to load the original data. Therefore, relatively speaking, the advantage of using transient storage to solve the communication problem between blocks is that the Gas Fee is low, and the future Ethereum data storage design does not need to consider the refund of operating fees due to temporary storage. However, EIP-1153 is not suitable for solving the use of temporary storage data in existing smart contracts. ▶ EIP-6780 "SELFDESTRUCT only in same transaction": Modify the function of the SELFDESTRUCT opcode to prepare for the future application of the Verkle Tree architecture (commonly referred to as "Walker Tree") on Ethereum. Currently, Ethereum uses the Merkle Tree architecture (commonly referred to as "Merkle Tree") architecture. Using the SELFDESTRUCT opcode can make a lot of changes to the account status, for example, code and storage can be deleted. However, when the Verkle Tree architecture is applied to Ethereum in the future, accounts cannot be easily modified or deleted because the Verkle Tree architecture stores each account in a different account key that is not connected to the root account. Therefore, EIP-6780 proposes a modification to the SELFDESTRUCT opcode function. According to EIP-6780, the modified SELFDESTRUCT opcode no longer has the ability to change or delete accounts during use and will only be used to transfer ETH to the caller, with one exception when SELFDESTRUCT is called in the same transaction created by a smart contract.

▶ EIP-4788「Beacon block root in the EVM」: Expose the beacon chain block root in the Ethereum virtual machine. The beacon chain block root is a cryptographic accumulator used to prove arbitrary consensus states. Exposing the beacon chain block root in the Ethereum virtual machine will allow for trust-minimized access to the Ethereum consensus layer. This is also an improved protocol that helps with use case development and will support use cases such as Staking Pools and smart contract bridges to improve their trust assumptions. ▶ EIP-5656「MCOPY - Memory copying instruction」: Provides an efficient Ethereum virtual machine instruction that can be used to copy memory areas. Memory copying is a basic operation that is very useful for various computationally intensive operations, but future implementations on the Ethereum virtual machine will also incur operational costs. The instruction introduced by EIP-5656 is a new instruction that did not exist before. If the smart contracts that have been released use this new instruction, pay attention to compatibility and may need to adjust the operation. ▶ EIP-7516「BLOBBASEFEE opcode」: Introduce the opcode BLOBBASEFEE. This opcode is the same as the BASEFEE opcode associated with the EIP-3198 protocol, except that BLOBBASEFEE returns the Blob base fee according to the EIP-4844 protocol in this Cancun upgrade. At the beginning of the "Cancun Upgrade" schedule (around April to May 2023), the execution layer protocols EIP-2537 (pre-compiled BLS12-381 curve operations) and EIP-5920 (introducing a new opcode PAY) that were hotly discussed and may be added to the "Cancun Upgrade" were not yet shown in the upgrade schedule as of December 8, 2023.

03 The improvement proposals for the Ethereum consensus layer "Deneb Upgrade" synchronized with the "Cancun Upgrade" include: · EIP-7400· · EIP-7045· · EIP-7514· ▶ EIP-7400 "Perpetually Valid Signed Voluntary Exits": Achieve permanent and valid voluntary exits with signatures. This technical protocol is mainly to lock the validator's exit signature domain on the current Capella consensus layer, so that it can obtain permanent validity after the "Cancun Upgrade", thereby reducing the complexity of staking operations on Ethereum. ▶ EIP-7045 "Increase max attestation inclusion slot": Increase the maximum attestation packaged plaintext ciphertext (plaintext slot). This technical protocol will be crucial to the current LMD-GHOST security analysis and rule confirmation. Now the validators on the chain have 32 plaintext slots that can be used to prove the broadcast. After the EIP-7045 technical protocol is implemented, the validators may have up to 64 plaintext slots to prove the broadcast. ▶ EIP-7514「Add Max Epoch Churn Limit」: Add Max Epoch Churn limit. The purpose of implementing this technical protocol is to mitigate the negative externalities caused by the growth of the total amount of staked ETH. EIP-7514 is a transitional solution, and there will be technical solutions specifically for the above problems in the future. With the growth of the total amount of ETH staked, a large number of unrestricted validators will lead to an increase in noise data, and the data pressure on the Ethereum consensus layer will also increase. In response to the above problems, the EIP-7514 technical improvement plan recommends setting the Max Churn limit to 8. This not only reduces the number of active validators added to the set, but also limits the unlimited growth of the set.   Focus on the primary and secondary markets of the currency circle. Dedicated to studying the primary skyrocketing currencies and the secondary high-quality potential currencies. V: wu354133 No threshold, no fees, no exchanges, no transaction links. Primary market projects that can also be listed: NFT trading platform established the second layer of Blur, ——Project name: blast Track: L2 Investment institution: paradigm Locking rules: Unlocked Issuance: 10 billion Expected launch time: 1st quarter First launch platform: Binance or Ouyi ——Project name: Nxyz Investment institution: Coinbase Sequoia Capital Greyloc Locking rules: Lock for 30 days and release in 5 times Expected launch time;December