Ethereum Foundation gives Dencun upgrade an activation time on March 13

The Dencun network upgrade has been “successfully activated on all testnets,” the Ethereum Foundation Blog announced on Tuesday. 

“Two years after its ETHDenver inception, dozens of testing calls and devnets later, protodanksharding is finally going live on mainnet,” the Ethereum Foundation said.

Dencun will be activated on the Ethereum mainnet on March 13 at epoch 269568, the blog post added. The activation will take place at 13:55 UTC, or 8:55 am ET.

According to a post on X from Galaxy’s Christine Kim, March 13 was the expected date for the activation, though the exact timestamp was unknown.

Stakers will need to update their beacon nodes and validator clients to be compatible with the upgrade. 

As of Feb. 22, according to Kim, “all client teams, except Lodestar, have released final software versions for the Dencun upgrade.”

Read more: Ethereum’s Dencun is now live on the Holesky testnet

The upgrade was run successfully on the Holešky testnet earlier this month. It previously ran on the Goerli and Sepolia testnets.

The upgrade will introduce proto-danksharding to the Ethereum blockchain. Rollups, under EIP-4844, can add “blobs” of data on a beacon node.

“The data in these blobs is not accessible to the EVM and is automatically deleted after a fixed time period (1-3 months). This means rollups can send their data much more cheaply and pass the savings on to end users in the form of cheaper transactions,” a post on the Ethereum Org’s website said in early January. 

The name Dencun, the Ethereum Foundation post added, comes from a combination of star and Devcon city names. Specifically, Dencun is the combination of Deneb — a star — and Devcon 3 location Cancun.

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