Ethereum is 20 Hours Away From Its Biggest Network Upgrade Ever

• Ethereum is preparing for the Dencun upgrade, which aims to reduce high transaction fees and enable scalability through layer 2 solutions like rollups and sharding.
• Dencun will increase Ethereum’s capacity and throughput by enhancing sharding to process transactions in parallel and expanding rollups to bundle transactions off-chain.
• By reducing fees, Dencun will spur wider adoption of Ethereum and layer 2 solutions, setting the groundwork for further upgrades that will improve speed, throughput, and access.

The Ethereum blockchain is preparing for its Dencun upgrade, which aims to lower transaction fees and enable scalability through layer 2 solutions. This upgrade marks an important milestone for the leading smart contract platform.

Why Fees Have Been High

Over the past year, fees on Ethereum have remained consistently high, making transactions expensive for users. This is largely due to increased demand and activity on Ethereum without a corresponding increase in throughput. Congestion on the network leads to bidding wars for block space, pushing fees up.

How Dencun Helps

The Dencun upgrade introduces key technical improvements that will increase Ethereum’s capacity and reduce reliance on the main chain. Specifically, enhancements to sharding and rollups will boost throughput and reduce fees.

Rollups – Scaling Ethereum

Rollups bundle or “roll up” transactions off-chain before submitting the collective data on-chain. This effectively compresses transaction data, reducing fees and congestion. Leading rollup providers like Optimism and Arbitrum will benefit from Dencun.

Sharding – More Throughput

Sharding splits the network into smaller partitions called shards that can process transactions in parallel. This will significantly increase Ethereum’s throughput and reduce congestion on the main chain.

Cheaper Fees to Spur Adoption

By reducing fees, Dencun will enable wider adoption of Ethereum and layer 2 solutions like rollups. Developers have struggled with high fees, which hurt user experience. Lower fees should lead to an influx of activity on layer 2 and beyond.

The Road Ahead

While Dencun is an incremental upgrade, it sets the groundwork for Ethereum’s continued evolution into a highly scalable and usable network. Further upgrades like sharding will continue to improve speed, throughput and access over the coming years.