Dencun upgrade goes live on Ethereum mainnet

• Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade went live on the mainnet on March 13, 2024 at 13:55 UTC.
• The upgrade introduces “blobs” which will see a significant reduction in transaction fees for Layer-2 protocols.

Ethereum core developers have activated the Dencun upgrade on the mainnet, with the highly anticipated implementation rolling out at epoch 269568 at 13:55 UTC. 

Dencun had previously successfully deployed on the Holesky testnet in February.

Dencun upgrade is live

The upgrade introduces “blobs,” with the EIP-4844 set to see a significant decrease in transaction fees for Layer 2 protocols.

Ethereum and several L2 tokens surged earlier in the week as the Dencun upgrade approached. While prices have slightly retreated in the last 24 hours, the community is super bullish on what this hard fork means for the broader Ethereum ecosystem.

The last time the community vibe has been this positive was during the previous two major upgrades – the Shanghai upgrade in April 2023 and the Merge in September 2022.

Implementation of the Shanghai upgrade on the mainnet enabled ETH holders to unstake their tokens for the first time since deposits opened ahead of the Merge. Dencun’s rollout brings data blobs to the mainnet, with proto-danksharding set to enhance data availability and help cut transaction fees for L2s.

Users across Base, Arbitrum One, Optimism, zkSync and Starknet among other L2 platforms will benefit from this reduction. The Arbitrum team posted on X:

Once the upgrade starts executing, we expect it will take an hour or two for blob transactions to begin posting and for new EIP-4844 pricing changes to begin to be seen.

ArbOS Atlas also introduces additional Arbitrum fee reductions for Arbitrum One. We expect this to be…

— Arbitrum (💙,🧡) (@arbitrum) March 13, 2024