The timing for the long-awaited Dencun upgrade, with its much-touted “proto-danksharding” feature, was announced Thursday on a call with top developers for the Ethereum blockchain.
The test simulated “proto-danksharding,” a technical feature aimed at reducing the cost of transactions for rollups as well as making veri availability cheaper.
Developers will run through Dencun on the Sepolia and Holesky testnets on Jan. 30 and Feb. 7, putting the upgrade on track to reach the main network in late February or early March.
Developers also penciled in the end of February as a soft target for the upgrade to hit the main Ethereum blockchain.
The new “Cronos zkEVM chain” is launching initially as a test network, based on Matter Labs’ software tools, which can be used to spin up new layer 2 and layer 3 “hyperchains” atop Ethereum.
The announcement comes as Celestia’s recent launch and airdrop has kindled interest in “modular” blockchain projects that can relieve the burden on primary networks like Ethereum.
The original planned launch date of Holesky, on Sept. 15, was supposed to celebrate the one-year anniversary of Ethereum’s historic “Merge” transition. But things didn’t go so smoothly. Now developers are trying again.
The debut of the testing system – designed to be twice as big as the main network so developers can simulate massive scaling, comes a year after Ethereum completed its historic “Merge” shift to a “proof-of-stake” model from the original “proof-of-work” setup that Bitcoin uses.