Ethereum lead developer Tim Beiko has hinted that the Dencun upgrade may not be rolled out to the mainnet this year as planned.
During the Ethereum Developers Call No. 118Beiko hinted that the delay in Dencun’s implementation on Ethereum’s public testnets may impact the launch of the upgrade on the mainnet.
As he explained during the call, if Dencun is not deployed on a public testnet before the Devconnect conference, which is scheduled for November, then the upgrade may not go live on the Ethereum mainnet until next year.
Beiko estimates that the Ethereum development team will not have enough time to deploy the Dencun upgrade on the mainnet before the Christmas holidays if it is not launched on a public testnet before the aforementioned conference.
Testnets offer experimental environments that allow teams to test new developments and updates before their official deployment or launch, in order to check their operation, find errors and correct faults. Hence their importance.
Dencun ensures Ethereum scalability
Dencun, which refers to the Cancun-Deneb update, is focused on improving the scalability of the mainnet by implementing proto-danksharding, a mechanism proposed by the network developers in EIP-4844 to increase throughput and reduce gas fees on transactions, ensuring the scalability and expansion of the network.
Cancun is the name given to the update in the Ethereum execution layer and Deneb is the name given to it in the consensus layer.
This upgrade is a fundamental part of Ethereum's plans to reach Danksharding and scale to more than 100 thousand transactions per second. However, its possible delay is being influenced by the failure that occurred in the launch of the Holesky test network last week.
Holesky will be released at the end of the month
In previous meetings, Beiko had recommended the deployment of Dencun on the Goerli, Sepolia and Holesky testnets. However, the latter was not launched as expected by the development team either, due to a problem that arose in the new network's generation specifications.
El Holesky's launch Holesky was scheduled to launch on September 15, but due to complications during its deployment, it was postponed for two weeks, so the launch of this test network will not occur until the end of the month. According to Beiko, Holesky's launch has been rescheduled for next Thursday, September 28.
Given the situation, Ethereum Foundation DevOps engineer Parithosh Jayanthi proposed starting Dencun testing on the Goerli testnet, as this testnet will be replaced by Holesky and will soon become obsolete. “I would still argue for Holesky not to be the first fork (of Dencun), but potentially the second or third, mainly because we have Goerli as a perfectly working testnet that is deprecated.” Jayanthi stressed that if something goes wrong with the Dencun deployment on the testnet, Goerli is an obsolete network anyway.
The cost and consequences of experimenting on an outdated testnet like Goerli are lower than on a long-lived network like Holesky, the developer said. His proposal to deploy Dencun first on Goerli rather than Holesky is supported by Beiko and other Ethereum Foundation developers.
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