Tech
5 things to know about Ethereum’s latest and greatest update: Dencun
Dencun, Ethereum’s biggest update since the network moved to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) 18 months ago, goes live tomorrow. Some developers have called economic release for cryptocurrencies due to its implications for how users interact with decentralized apps on Ethereum’s secondary (layer 2) scaling platforms.
This is an excerpt from The Node newsletter, a daily roundup of the most crucial crypto news on CoinDesk and beyond. You can sign up to get the full service newsletter here.
In short, Dencun will change the way data is stored on Ethereum, making it much more accessible and also more accessible cheaper to record level 2 transactions. It’s already been there very written about Dencun (a portmanteau of two separate updates, Cancun and Deneb, representing nine different Ethereum improvement proposals) and there is a lot to be said.
But the massive update has been in the works for a while, meaning there are potentially a lot of lesser-known details about how it arrived. Here’s what you need to know about how Dencun will affect you and how it happened:
The Gasless Era of Ethereum: Dencun will make L2 transactions extremely cheap, almost free, to the point that almost all activity on Ethereum will move to these networks. There could also be designs or protocols that incentivize usage by eating into the gas payments users typically have to pay (it would be cheaper than paying for marketing!).
Important milestone: Dencun is Ethereum’s biggest update since The Merge in September 2022, which transformed the network from a purposefully inefficient proof-of-work algorithm to staking. It is also one of the steps towards Ethereum’s ultimate goal of being able to support hundreds of different rollups and secondary scaling levels and one day process millions of transactions per second.
Long in the works: Dencun will introduce the Proto-Danksharding process, something long theorized (it was first mentioned by Buterin in 2019) that changes the way Ethereum stores data. Instead of keeping all data directly on the immutable execution layer of the Ethereum mainnet, which is expensive and computationally heavy, Dencun will introduce a new temporary way of storing “blobs” of data, which is cheaper. Blobs may seem like a silly term, but they’re actually a common concept in computing. Similar data management blobs exist in programming languages such as Javascript and Python.
Etymology: Proto-Danksharding is named after two Ethereum researchers, Dankrad Feist and Proto Lambda, who proposed the change. It’s appropriate because Proto Danksharding is needed for the full launch of Danksharding, which is several years away and takes the idea of further simplifying data storage. Additionally, although the term “sharding” is in the name, neither Danksharding nor Proto-Danksharding is a traditional way to “shard” – or split – a database into smaller pieces as known in computer science, which was the original plan to get Ethereum. climb. In some ways, Dencun’s introduction of Proto-Danksharding is a serious deviation from the original roadmap for Ethereum, chosen because it is easier to implement.
The biggest ceremony ever: The first step in the creation of Proto-Danksharding occurred in 2022 with the largest “Trusted Setup” ceremony in the world. Named after the researchers (Aniket Kate, Gregory M. Zaverucha, and Ian Goldberg) who created a key component that makes blob storage possible on Ethereum, tens of thousands of people attended what is now called the KZG ceremony, which was a way for the Ethereum community to collectively generate a secret random string of data needed for proto-danksharding to work.