The Prysm Ethereum client initially suffered a bug triggering a post-fork network split<\/p>\n
Ethereum\u2019s forthcoming Dencun upgrade is now live on the Georli testnet, but its deployment did not initially go as planned.<\/p>\n
The Goerli Dencun\u00a0fork<\/a>\u00a0took place on Jan. 17 at around 1:35 am, replacing the gas-intensive calldata with blobs through\u00a0EIP-4844<\/a>. The upgrade, also referred to as proto-danksharding, will increase data availability and significantly reduce transaction fees on Layer 2, in addition to laying the infrastructure for Ethereum to become sharded in the future.<\/p>\n However, Dencun\u2019s Goerli deployment initially\u00a0suffered<\/a>\u00a0a network split after Prysm, an Ethereum client, encountered a bug at the time of the fork.<\/p>\n \u201cPrysm encountered a bug right at Goerli’s hard fork,\u201d\u00a0tweeted<\/a>\u00a0Terence Tsao of Prysmatic Labs, the team behind Prysm. \u201cThe bug has been identified, and a fix is currently being merged.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Paritosh, a DevOps engineer at the Ethereum Foundation, confirmed Dencun\u2019s finalization on Goerli roughly two hours later.<\/p>\n \u201cAfter the fix was patched in, the validators came back online and the chain started finalizing again,\u201d Paritosh\u00a0tweeted<\/a>. \u201cAll L2s can start testing EIP-4844 now.\u201d<\/p>\n Dencun will next go live on the\u00a0Holesky<\/a>\u00a0testnet on Jan. 30, before going live on mainnet come Feb. 7 \u2014 assuming no major issues are encountered beforehand.<\/p>\n Dencun is expected to significantly reduce the fees associated with transacting on Layer 2, allowing L2s to compete with alternative Layer 1s on fees while inheriting Ethereum\u2019s robust security layer.<\/p>\n A recent increase in\u00a0on-chain activity<\/a>\u00a0has driven up Layer 2 transaction costs, with gas fees up between roughly 100% and 200% since mid-October on leading L2s Arbitrum, OP Mainnet, ZkSync Era, Base, and Linea.<\/p>\n Unlike calldata, the blob data introduced by Dencun do not compete with Ethereum transactions for gas usage, significantly reducing the blockspace needed to process transactions on L2. <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Start for free<\/a><\/div>\n <\/p>\n In an appearance on\u00a0The Defiant Podcast<\/a>, Carl Beekhuizen of the Ethereum Foundation described the cost of storing data on-chain as the primary bottleneck restricting the scalability gains available at Layer 2.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you scale to thousands and thousands of transactions, then all of a sudden it costs a lot just to [store the data] on-chain,\u201d Beekhuizen\u00a0said<\/a>. \u201cThe idea behind Danksharding and EIP-4844 is to provide really cheap data storage\u2026 so the L2s can provide cheap transactions to their users.\u201d<\/p>\nScalability gains<\/h2>\n
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