In 2023, the Ethereum network was marked by a major update: Shanghai. This finalized the transition to Proof of Stake by allowing ETH deposited in staking to be withdrawn. Subsequently, the developers looked at another project: the hard fork Cancun Deneb. This could be deployed in the coming months.
Cancun-Deneb: Rollups on steroids
The hard fork Cancun Deneb is a major update particularly awaited by the Ethereum community. In fact, this will introduce EIP 4844to know Proto-Danksharding. Without going into too much detail, this EIP introduces a new type of transaction intended for data storage.
This one will be particularly useful for rollup solutions who need to publish on-chain transaction data. Therefore, this update should make it possible to increase the performance of Ethereum layers 2 tenfold.
Unfortunately, although it was initially planned for the end of 2023, this update has been postponed until the first quarter of 2024.
A deployment on the mainnet in February?
During the last developer meeting, they discussed the subject of deployment of Cancun-Deneb on the mainnet. Thus, the latter plan to deploy the hard fork on the testnet by February.
“Ideally, this means we’ll publish the blog post for the fork during the week of January 8, so people have at least a week to get up to speed. »
explained Tim Beiko.
However, the latter leave themselves the possibility of postponing the deployment in the event of a “major problem” before the launch.
In a first draft of planning, the developers considered a deployment on the Sepolia testnet on January 31 then on the Holesky testnet on February 7. THE deployment on the mainnet could take place before the end of February.
Obviously, this schedule should be taken with a pinch of salt. The slightest incident on one of the testnets could lead to a postponement of the hard fork.
For his part, Vitalik Buterin continues to propose innovative developments to the network. So, this one has recently discussed integrating a zkEVM into the core of Ethereum in order to improve the performance of zk-Rollups.