Dencun: Ethereum's Largest Upgrade Since Proof-of-Stake Transition Set to Go Live

According to CoinDesk, Dencun, the most significant Ethereum upgrade since the network switched to proof-of-stake (PoS) 18 months ago, is expected to go live soon. The upgrade will change how data is stored on Ethereum, making it more accessible and cheaper to record layer 2 transactions. Dencun, a combination of two separate updates, Cancun and Deneb, accounts for nine separate Ethereum Improvement Proposals. Dencun will make layer 2 transactions nearly costless, potentially causing almost all activity on Ethereum to switch to these networks. Some projects or protocols may even incentivize use by covering the gas payments users typically have to bear. This upgrade is the largest since The Merge in September 2022, which transitioned the network from a proof-of-work algorithm to staking. It is also a step towards Ethereum's ultimate goal of supporting hundreds of different rollups and secondary scaling layers and processing millions of transactions per second. Dencun will introduce the process of Proto-Danksharding, first mentioned by Buterin in 2019, which changes how Ethereum stores data. Instead of keeping all data directly on the Ethereum mainnet's immutable execution layer, which is expensive and computationally heavy, Dencun will introduce a new, temporary way of storing 'blobs' of data, which is cheaper. Proto-Danksharding is named after two Ethereum researchers, Dankrad Feist and Proto Lambda, who proposed the change. The first step in setting up Proto-Danksharding occurred in 2022 with the world's largest 'Trusted Setup' ceremony, the KZG Ceremony, involving tens of thousands of people generating a secret random string of data needed for proto-danksharding to work.