Ethereum developers confirmed at yesterday’s core developer meeting that the planned “Dencun upgrade”, originally scheduled for implementation by the end of 2023, will not happen this year. According to Blockworks, when the new Holešky testnet was delayed last month, it was widely believed that the Dencun upgrade was unlikely to occur before the end of the year. At today’s developer meeting, Prysm developer Potuz explicitly stated that a mainnet hard fork upgrade in 2023 is not possible. He mentioned that in the past few months, the 10 developer networks (devnets) set up for testing upgrades have all experienced ongoing consensus issues, with none of them being successful.
Ethereum developers are mainly divided into two camps, the “execution layer” and the “consensus layer”. The names of hard fork upgrades usually reflect this distinction, with consensus layer development teams using the name of the city where Ethereum’s main conference Devcon is held (such as Cancun), while execution layer client developers choose star names (such as Deneb), hence the name of this upgrade as “Dencun”.
Despite obstacles faced by the consensus layer developers, the execution layer developers have indicated that their progress is relatively smooth. The execution layer client team reported that they are ready to conduct larger tests on the Goerli testnet. However, Potuz from Prysm expressed concerns about these tests and believes that there are still many significant modifications needed.