“Ethereum’s highly anticipated Dencun Upgrade encounters unexpected delays and navigates through consensus hurdles, showcasing the complexity and challenges of implementing groundbreaking blockchain advancements.”
Ethereum developers have announced that the highly anticipated Dencun upgrade will not be implemented through a network hard fork before the end of 2023. This decision comes after consistent consensus issues arose during testing on developer networks. Concerns about the feasibility of implementing the upgrade on time have been raised due to the unsatisfactory performance of these test networks.
Last month, the Holešky testnet was successfully launched, albeit behind schedule, indicating that the upgrade might not be adequately tested by the end of the year. During a recent All Core Developers call, a more optimistic timeline was proposed, but the prevailing sentiment among developers was that forking the mainnet in 2023 is not feasible.
The division between Ethereum clients is evident, with one camp focusing on the execution layer and the other on the consensus layer. This division is reflected in the name of the Dencun upgrade, with consensus teams adopting city names while execution client developers choose star names. The readiness of each camp differs, with execution layer client teams reporting being well-prepared for upcoming testnets.
Devnet 10 has been launched, with plans for execution clients to transition to a larger test on the Goerli testnet. However, there are reservations about this plan, as substantial and ongoing changes in the codebase have been observed. Some developers suggest delaying the transition until after Ethereum’s Devconnect developer conference in mid-November.
The Dencun upgrade relies on sophisticated cryptography to ensure the security of the Ethereum scaling improvement known as Proto-Danksharding. The KZG Ceremony, which involves multiple participants and secret computations, plays a crucial role in producing a “structured reference string” integral to the cryptographic scheme. A total of 141,416 participants have contributed to the ceremony, ensuring the security of the upgrade.
Participants in the KZG Ceremony have been invited to verify their contributions at ceremony.ethereum.org and receive a commemorative POAP NFT as a mark of Ethereum’s ongoing development.
In related news, FTX debtors have shuffled $20 million worth of SOL and ETH cold wallets.
