A Quick Look at Ethereum’s Dencun Upgrade

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

The word Dencun; is a compound word of "Cancun" and "Deneb". Cancun; is the name of the Ethereum execution layer upgrade, and "Deneb" is the name of the protocol layer upgrade.

Therefore, Cancun;upgrade and;Deneb;upgrade are collectively called;Dencun'upgrade.

The upgrade includes five; EIPs, designed to add more data storage and lower fees. The upgrade takes "EIP-4844" as the core, in addition, it also includes "EIP-1153, EIP-4788, EIP-5656, EIP-6780" four improvement proposals.

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 expand the blockchain and is forward compatible; Ethereum; expansion roadmap.

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

This upgrade is expected to reduce the "gas" cost of L2;rollup;.

EIP-1153;

EIP-1153; Temporary storage opcodes were introduced. Temporary storage is used, which is discarded after each transaction. Values stored temporarily are never serialized to storage.

The Optimism; team once explained the motivation of this proposal. Only on "Uniswap", this proposal can save users an estimated "gas" cost of up to "3 million" US dollars.

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.

Simplify; gas; accounting rules.

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.

Following the introduction of this proposal, the EVM exposes the beacon chain root to allow trust-minimized access to the Ethereum consensus layer. Due to this feature, dApp;use cases can improve their own trust assumptions, so the development of applications such as;Staking;Pools, smart contract bridges, etc. will be easier.

EIP-5656;

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

This proposal introduces changes to code related to the Ethereum Virtual Machine. In other production environments, memory copying is a basic operation, but implementing this feature on the "EVM" will incur a "gas" overhead. This proposal will provide Ethereum with an efficient "EVM" instruction that can be used to copy memory regions. This instruction is useful for various computationally intensive operations (eg;EVM;384;) where memory copying is identified as a significant overhead.

EIP-6780;

EIP-6780; Changed 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 have considered removing the ;SELFDESTRUCT; opcode, but this proposal takes a different approach.

EIP-6780; will attempt to keep some common usage of "SELFDESTRUCT;" alive, while reducing the complexity of implementing changes to the "EVM" 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".