Upgrade Testing for Ethereum ‘Dencun’ Scheduled for Jan. 17

Ethereum’s Cancun-Deneb Upgrade

Ethereum’s upcoming upgrade, “Cancun-Deneb” (also known as “Dencun”), is set to begin testing on Jan. 17, according to a note published on the official Ethereum Github repository. The upgrade will first be applied to the Goerli testnet, with Sepolia following on Jan. 30 and Holesky on Feb. 7. There is no word yet on when Dencun will be implemented on the mainnet.

The new upgrade includes several tools designed to reduce fees, enable new features like bridges and staking pools, and limit the use of self-destruct operations on smart contracts. Among them is Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 4844, also known as “proto-danksharding,” which allows layer-2 rollup networks like Arbitrum, Base, Polygon zkEVM and others to store certain transaction data temporarily using a format called “blobs.” These blobs can be deleted after 18 days, as opposed to the current practice of including the data in the CALLDATA field and keeping it on the blockchain indefinitely.

The upgrade also includes other proposals, such as EIP-1153, which introduces a “transient storage” system to further reduce fees, and EIP-4788, which increases transparency by storing the root of each Beacon chain block in a smart contract that can be queried by applications. Developers anticipate that the data provided by EIP-4788 will be used for new features related to bridges and staking pools in the crypto polygon.

In addition, Dencun contains EIP-6780, a proposal to limit the use of the self-destruct keyword. If embedded within a contract before deployment, self-destructs can currently be used to erase the code for a smart contract and send all of its funds to the account that deployed it. After Dencun, this keyword will not erase the code unless it is called within the same transaction in which it was deployed, but the funds will still be sent to the deployer, even if it is called in a future transaction.

Ethereum upgrades usually undergo testing for a few months before being deployed to mainnet. The previous deployment, codenamed “Shapella,” began its lucky block crypto testing on Feb. 7. It was launched to the full send crypto mainnet on April 12.