Key Facts: With Dencun, EIP-4844 is activated, which includes Proto-Danksharding. A new era of scalability begins, developers say. This Wednesday, March 13, 2024, will remain as another historic date for Ethereum. The network has just activated Dencun, a major update that brings improvements to the organization of data stored in Ethereum's distributed ledger.
“A new era of scalability begins for Ethereum,” wrote developer Anthony Sassano, announcing that Dencun had already been activated. Many other projects and developers celebrated the milestone on social media, highlighting its importance for Ethereum's future scalability. Slot 8626176 marked the activation of this new version of Ethereum, to which all nodes must be updated. Dencun brings two notable new features to Ethereum. On the one hand, the ability to generate blobs («masses» or «blobs»), a mechanism for organizing data in the blocks that optimizes the use of space in each of them. Likewise, the ability to save data off-chain (outside Ethereum's accounting) that is always available to the nodes contributes to this optimization.
The main benefit of this for users has to do with the reduction of commissions, both by using the main Ethereum network and its second layers, as reported yesterday in BitcoinDynamic. In addition to the aforementioned improvements, Dencun also activates EIP-4844, an Ethereum improvement proposal that includes Proto-Danksharding. Named in honor of the developers who devised it, it is a method capable of making data structuring in Ethereum more efficient through various specific technical improvements.