Ethereum's Dencun hard fork introduces EIP-4844, reducing rollup costs and improving scalability. Learn about the impact on layer-2 protocols.
Layer-2 protocols scaling Ethereum are poised to benefit from significantly reduced rollup costs with the upcoming Dencun hard fork. However, end-users might not immediately see the full impact.
Polygon Labs VP of Product, David Silverman, informed Cointelegraph that the latest Ethereum hard fork, featuring several EIPs (Ethereum Improvement Proposals), will take a few weeks for rollup protocols to fully implement:
“Within about a month and a half or two months, every single L2 that wants to use blob space as a rollup will be moved over, and then users will see the full benefit.”
The Dencun hard fork encompasses nine different EIPs and combines the Cancun upgrade of Ethereum’s execution layer with the Deneb upgrade on the consensus layer.
One of the major focuses of the hard fork is EIP-4844, which alters how Ethereum rollups store data on the mainnet. Silverman explains that several layer-2 rollups aggregate and process transactions off-chain, submitting a summary proof of these transactions to the Ethereum blockchain.
“There’s only one type of storage in Ethereum currently — call data storage on the execution layer. It’s permanent, meaning if I post something, whether it’s the image for an NFT or transaction data for a rollup, all Ethereum nodes must store that state forever,” Silverman explains.