Glitch in upgrade of Ethereum Goerli testnet won’t delay Dencun rollout

Blobs are live on Goerli.

Ethereum’s Goerli testnet successfully forked to “Dencun,” featuring the “Proto-Danksharding” EIP-4844 innovation.

That paves the way for two more major testnet forks, keeping on schedule, for now, a further move to Ethereum mainnet by the end of March.

The consensus coming out of Thursday’s All Core Devs meeting was to prepare a new software version by mid-next week. This could be used for both the Sepolia and Holesky testnets, slated for Jan. 30 and Feb. 7, respectively.

Dencun’s concept of “blobs” is a key component of the upgrade, and refers to a large piece of data that is not directly included in an Ethereum block but is instead referenced by the block.

By including extra data for transactions, Ethereum will better serve rollups that use mainnet for data availability. Rollups are expected to see around a 90% cost savings, which they will pass on to users in the form of cheaper transactions.

Read more: Dencun and Pralectra: Ethereum core devs chart an ambitious 2024

Even though the data in blobs is stored off-chain, the integrity and availability of this data are still maintained. Blobs are designed to be cryptographically secure, ensuring that the data they reference is immutable and verifiable.

Client diversity wins the day…again
A minor consensus issue in the popular Prysm client caused the forked chain to encounter difficulty finalizing blocks.

Terence Tsao, protocol developer at Offchain Labs, which develops the Prysm client, estimated the resulting delay at about four hours while the team patched the problem.