Ethereum's Dencun update is scheduled for March 13

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Ethereum’s long-awaited Dencun upgrade is set to go live on March 13, at 1:55 pm (UTC). After successfully implementing the Dencun upgrade on the Holesky testnet on Feb. 7, the Ethereum core developers team decided on the date for the mainnet rollout during the
bi-weekly “Consensus Layer Meeting” call.

The reason why the crypto community is anticipating this update is Ethereum Improvement Proposal 4844 (EIP-4844), called “Proto-Danksharding”, which will be included through Dencun. In simple terms, this update will introduce ‘blobs’, which are spaces within blocks allowing more information to be stored while maintaining block finality times.

“Those blobs are especially beneficial to Ethereum’s layer-2 blockchains, which will have more of their transactions stored in the network’s blocks. For users, this will result in layer-2 fees at least 10 times cheaper,” explains Rony Szuster, a crypto analyst at Brazilian exchange Mercado Bitcoin.

Szuster highlights that Ethereum itself could benefit from those changes, although the reductions in fees will be potentially “marginal”. “Since the layer-2 transactions will have a specific block space, then Ethereum will have a little more space to include mainnet transactions,” he adds.

Developer teams have until Feb. 22 to release their final versions of Ethereum clients with Dencun support, and validators will have approximately two weeks to update their nodes with these new client versions.

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