The Ethereum blockchain is on track for a colossal rebranding as the hotly-anticipated Dencun upgrade with proto-danksharding was successfully deployed on the second of three testnets, Sepolia, on Tuesday.

Dencun Goes Live On Sepolia

Dencun is coming. Ethereum core developers activated the network upgrade on the Sepolia testnet at 22:51 UTC on Jan. 30, and it was finalized shortly after.

“Blobs are now flowing in Sepolia,” Parithosh Jayanthi, DevOps engineer at the Ethereum Foundation, said on X. “Uneventful testnet forks are the best ones!”

The Ethereum development team implemented Dencun on the Goerli test network earlier this month with a few hiccups. Sepolia is the second of three testnets, which will be followed by the third and final testnet Holesky, on Feb. 7. The third successful testnet activation will serve as a precursor to Dencun’s anticipated launch on the Ethereum mainnet by March, as noted by Ethereum educator Anthony Sassano:

Of particular interest is EIP-4844, which enables proto-danksharding, a novel improvement touted to drastically lower L2 transaction costs and boost scalability by introducing a new compartmentalized data storage mechanism known as “blobs”. Data is momentarily stored in these blobs to verify transactions and can be safely deleted after a certain time period to avoid network overload. 

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After successful execution, Dencun will enable the Ethereum network to handle over 100,000 transactions per second at lower fees. It will do this by making Ethereum layer-2 scaling protocols such as Optimism much cheaper, developers promise. 

The Ethereum network is constantly improving. Most notably, in September 2022, the second-largest blockchain transitioned from a proof of work consensus algorithm to proof of stake in a highly-publicized upgrade dubbed “the Merge.” Last April, Ethereum finalized the Shapella upgrade, enabling withdrawals for users who had staked their ether tokens to secure and validate transactions on the network.