The long-anticipated Dencun upgrade finally went live on the Ethereum mainnet Wednesday morning at around 9:55 am ET.

Dencun’s core revolves around EIP 4844, often called “proto-danksharding,” which seeks to enhance blockchain scalability by expanding the capacity for data “blobs.” These modifications are anticipated to lower costs associated with layer 2 rollups as well.

• According to Tim Beiko, the head of the protocol support team at the Ethereum Foundation, Dencun incorporates 9 Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), making it the largest single hard fork in terms of improvements deployed.
• Layer-2 solutions such as Arbitrum, Optimism, and Polygon stand to gain the greatest advantage from Dencun. These solutions contribute to the Layer-1 blockchain’s scalability by aggregating user transactions and transmitting them to Ethereum for collective settlement.

The Dencun upgrade is now live on the Ethereum mainnet bringing with it a host of EIPs including the beloved EIP-4844!

The blobs are here and a new era of Ethereum scalability has begun! pic.twitter.com/ZQwwUsmYVv

— sassal.eth/acc 🦇🔊 (@sassal0x) March 13, 2024

• Following Dencun’s implementation, these Layer-2 solutions will have the capability to submit data to Ethereum within the dedicated “blobspace,” eliminating the need to incur additional expenses to fit the data into standard transactions.
• This improvement theoretically enables Layer-2 solutions to settle a greater volume of data more effectively, all while lowering transaction fees for end-users.
• Announcing the milestone, Beiko tweeted,

“Dencun is both the most complex fork we’ve shipped since the Merge, and tied for “most total EIPs in a fork” with Byzantium. There were more teams than ever involved in the process, and it somehow all worked out smoothly…! Grateful to work with all of them, onto the next one.”