The proposed release of Ethereum (ETH) latest major upgrade which is referred to as Deneb-Cancun or “Dencun,” may be imparted by certain concerns surrounding its deployment timeline.
According to a discussion amongst the core developers published on Youtube, the upgrade might be delayed till next year, maybe around the first quarter. It is worth noting that this is a derailment from the initial projection of the network.
The only way that the deployment would not be postponed to early 2024 is if the Dencun upgrade is deployed on public testnet before the DevConnect event which will be held in November. So far, many developers have equally supported the launch of Dencun on the public testnet before Devconnect, but the challenges are visible.
“If we don’t launch a [public] testnet before DevConnect, it’s probably unlikely we can go live on the mainnet before the Christmas holidays,” Tim Beiko from the Ethereum Foundation said
Ethereum’s Dencun was built to address the problem of scalability within the Ethereum ecosystem. The protocol does this by implementing an improvement proposal named EIP-4844. Deploying the upgrade would require a number of elements to be in place.
One of these elements is the readiness of the software code across Ethereum’s execution and consensus layers as well as the preparedness of multiple client teams.
Dencun Upgrade Launch Schedules
During the recently held ETH consensus-layer meeting that was led by Tim Beiko from the Ethereum Foundation, the plan for the deployment of the protocol was discussed.
Beiko voiced his concern about the potential delay in the deployment of Dencun which were significantly linked to the fact that the solution is yet to be released on public testnets like Goerli, Sepolia, and Holesky.
Ethereum Foundation DevOps engineer Parithosh Jayanthi proposed that Dencun be launched on Goerli first, before going on Holesky. He based his proposal on the fact that Goerli is a soon-to-be-deprecated testnet, citing that developers can freely experiment with modifying the Dencun specifications. Italian businessman Del Fente and Beiko agreed that Dencun should be tested on Goerli before Holesky.
There had been a failed launch on Holesky on September 15 and it was rescheduled to take place on September 28. In the meantime, the upgrade work is still in the “devnet phase.”
