Ethereum Devs Aim to Activate Dencun in January 2024

Ethereum developers agreed to set a Goerli fork date to activate Dencun in January 2024, if things keep going as planned.

The All Core Developers Execution Call (ACDE), a bi-weekly meeting where developers coordinate changes to the Execution Layer of the Ethereum blockchain, concluded on Thursday with an update on the activation date for the Dencun upgrade.

The developers agreed that, if all goes well, they will set a Goerli fork date to activate Dencun on the testnet in January 2024.

Goerli is Ethereum’s first multi-client testnet, which went live ahead of The Merge in two phases last year. In the coming months, Goerli will stop being supported by Ethereum client and Ethereum Foundation testing teams, making Dencun the last-ever upgrade that will be implemented on the network.

Tim Beiko, the Ethereum Foundation’s protocol support lead, recommended coordinating a hard fork as soon as developers return from the holiday break, assuming no major bugs are discovered in clients on Devnet 12.

“Teams seem generally ready to move towards forking testnets! We have a big Goerli shadow fork planned in the next couple weeks, and, assuming this doesn’t find issues, then forking Goerli itself would provide the most testing value,” he noted.

Beiko has also created a Meta EIP document ahead of Dencun that lists all the Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) included in the upgrade.

Previous forks have their specs nested in two different places of two different repos, and combined EL/CL upgrades didn’t have a single, canonical list of EIPs. Having Meta EIPs makes all of this much easier to understand. That said, no objections to changing the category name!

— timbeiko.eth ☀️ (@TimBeiko) December 7, 2023

The final item on the agenda was planning for the Prague/Electra network upgrade, where certain code updates will require changes on both the Execution Layer and Client Layer, and as such the Prague and Electra upgrades will need to be coordinated at the same time.

Developers have already started proposing the upgrades that they would like to include in a thread on EthMagicians.