In the early hours of this morning, Ethereum developers have confirmed the upcoming comprehensive upgrade of the network. This upgrade is named Dencun.

Dencun is a portmanteau of Cancun and Deneb. Cancun is the name of the Ethereum execution layer upgrade, while Deneb is the name of the protocol layer upgrade.

Therefore, the Cancun upgrade and the Deneb upgrade are collectively called the Dencun upgrade.

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EIP-4844 

EIP-4844 is at the heart of this upgrade, an improvement commonly referred to as proto-danksharding. This proposal introduces a new transaction type to Ethereum that can accept "blobs" of data stored on beacon nodes for short periods of time. This improvement frees up more room to scale the blockchain and is forward compatible with the Ethereum scaling roadmap.

The implications of EIP-4844 are profound. Complete data sharding takes a long time to complete and deploy, but based on rollup, sharding can be realized at low cost. And EIP-4844 promises to reduce rollup fees by an order of magnitude. Developers believe the feature will allow ethereum to remain competitive without sacrificing decentralization.

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EIP-1153 

EIP-1153 introduces temporary storage opcodes. Temporary storage is used, which is discarded after each transaction. Values ​​stored temporarily are never serialized to storage.

The Optimism team has explained the motivation for this proposal. On Uniswap alone, this proposal can save users an estimated gas cost of up to $3 million.

The benefits of this proposal include:

Temporary storage opcodes are considered separately, so making this update can't inadvertently break things.

The client does not need to load the original value.

Storage slots do not need to be cleared after use.

The semantics of existing operations are not changed.

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EIP-4788 

EIP-4788 improves the design of bridges and stake pools. The proposal would expose the beacon chain block root in the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Roots of the Beacon Chain Blocks are cryptographic accumulators used to prove arbitrary consensus states.

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EIP-5656 

EIP-5656 introduces a new instruction by which developers can copy specified memory regions.

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EIP-6780 

EIP-6780 changes the functionality of the SELFDESTRUCT opcode. Previously, this opcode made extensive changes to the state of the account, notably removing all code and storage. In the past developers considered removing the SELFDESTRUCT opcode, but this proposal takes a different approach.

EIP-6780 will attempt to keep some common uses of SELFDESTRUCT alive while reducing the complexity of EVM implementation changes from contract versioning.

In its net effect, the proposal removes code that could terminate a smart contract.

There's no firm date for the upgrade yet, but it's expected to go live by the end of 2023.