Ethereum proto-dunksharking successfully live on Goerli Testnet

One of the major improvements in the Ethereum blockchain was the Denkun update on January 17th by integrating the Goerli tesnet with live proto-danksharding (EIP-4844). This testnet deployment sets the stage for further improvements to the Sepolia and Holesky testnets and the final launch on the Ethereum mainnet.

Despite the setbacks, the Denkun update was successfully deployed on the Goerli testnet.

“Goerli forked and blobs are now live on the testnet!” Paritosh Jayanthi, a DevOps engineer at the Ethereum Foundation, wrote on XPost. They confirmed the implementation. Also watch the live stream of the update.

While the implementation was underway, it hit unexpected roadblocks, including a possible “chain-split” when there were synchronization problems between clients. Jayanthi attributed the Gourley fork's failure to reach consensus and finalization due to low participation by Prysm's verifiers, 80% of whom went online during the launch.

Ethereum evolution

Prysm maintainer Terence said that this issue could be due to a software update and lack of a software bug.

to realize

“Participation is low (~80%). Loss of finality requires approximately 10% of validators to be offline. Offlineness can be due to operators not upgrading a software (and there are many)… or a software bug.”

However, Jayanthi said that within a few hours the problem was fixed and the verifiers were back online, successfully reaching the end.

One thing to note is that the Goreli testnet will stop working within one to three months after the Denkun update is successfully implemented. After this decision, the Ethereum Foundation admitted that this will affect the stability of the network somewhat.

Still, it would be a good opportunity to test the latencies and security when many validators are down.

Lower transaction costs coming soon?

It is one of the major upgrades of the Ethereum network following the Denkun merger and Shanghai. The update is expected to introduce several improvements to Ethereum, such as reducing the cost and storage requirements of storing transaction data, improving the cross-chain design, and changing the data structure of blocks, among others.

In addition, Denkun aims to significantly reduce transaction costs for Optimist wallets like Arbitrum or Optimism, attracting more users and increasing the scale of Ethereum.

Before finalizing on Gorely, the development team first implemented Denkun on several testnets to check for potential issues. If Denkun runs smoothly in all these testnet environments without any major bugs, activation on the mainnet is planned and planned for Q1/2024.

With a successful implementation, all eyes will be on the Ethereum price movement during the first quarter of the year. Layer 2 protocols will be the focus, as Denkun's upgrade is expected to bring significant benefits to these protocols.

At press time, Ethereum was around $2,500, down 2.35% in the last 24 hours. The decline was reported by the Ethereum Foundation following the participation in the sale of ATH on over-the-counter (OTC) exchanges. Specifically, the group transferred 100 ETH (equivalent to $253,000) to the 0xd77 address and received 253,000 DAI in return.

While ETH is the main token, it will have to contend with other blockchains going forward. For example, SOL is gaining attention, and this could make it a real threat to ETH in the coming years.

In the year In 2023, the firm reportedly lost 2,262 ETH at an average of $1,609 per ETH. These differences are often noticed before a market downturn, which attracts attention in the cryptocurrency community.

Despite these sales, the Ethereum Foundation maintains a substantial ETH portfolio. On-chain data indicates that total ETH assets are $886 million, including $806 million in ETH and $79.81 million in WETH. Additionally, they have about $500,000 in Stablecoins and $15,000 in Binance Coin (BNB).