The Ethereum Foundation announced today that following the completion of the Dencun upgrade on the Goerli testnet on January 17th, the Sepolia and Holesky testnets will activate the Kankan upgrade on January 30th and February 7th respectively. If these two testnets’ upgrades go smoothly, the Ethereum mainnet will be the next to activate the upgrade.
The next major upgrade of Ethereum, Kankan (Dencun), was launched on the Goerli testnet on January 17th. According to the latest announcement from the Ethereum Foundation today, the Sepolia and Holesky testnets will proceed with the Dencun upgrade within the next two weeks.
Following the successful hard fork upgrade of Dencun on the Goerli testnet on January 17th, Sepolia will be activated at Epoch 132608, estimated to be at 22:51 UTC on January 30th (6:51 am on January 31st Taiwan time). Holesky will be activated at Epoch 29696, estimated to be at 11:35 UTC on February 7th (7:35 pm on February 7th Taiwan time).
The Ethereum Foundation stated that if the subsequent upgrades of Sepolia and Holesky go smoothly, the Ethereum mainnet will be scheduled to activate the Dencun upgrade. It was previously revealed that this could happen as early as the end of February.
Note: The term “Dencun” is a combination of the Mexican city Cancun and Deneb. The “Cancun” upgrade occurs at the Ethereum execution layer and includes rule changes for all protocols. The consensus layer responsible for block validation will undergo its own fork, known as “Deneb”. Therefore, the combined upgrade is referred to as “Dencun”.
Goerli Kankan upgrade encountered issues
However, it is worth noting that Ethereum developers encountered issues with low participation of validators and chain split during the Dencun upgrade on the Goerli testnet on January 17th (different nodes having different versions of transaction history on the blockchain). The development team has conducted further testing and investigation on this matter.
Tim Beiko, a core Ethereum developer, stated that if there are no additional Goerli validators participating in the upgrade, there may be “non-finality testing” conducted to understand how the network will operate with low validator participation.
Further reading:
Issues with the Dencun upgrade on the Goerli testnet: Two major problems encountered
EIP-4844’s blob to significantly reduce L2 fees
The Dencun upgrade of Ethereum includes multiple updates, with the most notable core proposal being EIP-4844: Proto-Danksharding. It aims to enhance Ethereum’s scalability by introducing a new transaction type (blob-carrying transactions) and is expected to reduce Layer2 transaction costs by 10-100 times. Other upgrade contents also contribute to further fee reduction and network congestion alleviation.
Tim Beiko mentioned earlier this month that some blobs have been sent on the network after the completion of the Dencun upgrade on the Goerli testnet. However, most of the currently transmitted blobs are empty.
Blobs are a new transaction format introduced through EIP-4844 (protodanksharding) and are used to “temporarily” store transaction data (blobs can be deleted after 18 days), enhancing Ethereum’s data storage capacity and potentially further reducing transaction costs on the second-layer network.
Further reading:
How will the new EIP proposals change Ethereum after the Kankan upgrade?
After the Kankan upgrade, Layer2 will face “internal conflicts”. How will the market evolve?
MT Capital Research Report: Interpreting the principles and investment opportunities behind the Kankan upgrade.