This Wednesday, March 13, 2024, will remain as another historic date for Ethereum. The network has just activated Dencun, a major update that brings improvements to the organization of data stored in Ethereum's distributed ledger.

“A new era of scalability begins for Ethereum,” wrote developer Anthony Sassano, announcing that Dencun had already been activated. Many other projects and developers celebrated the milestone on social media, highlighting its importance for Ethereum's future scalability. Slot 8626176 marked the activation of this new version of Ethereum, to which all nodes must be updated.

Dencun brings two notable new features to Ethereum. On the one hand, the ability to generate blobs ("masses" or "blobs"), a mechanism for organizing data in the blocks that optimizes the use of space in each of them. Likewise, the ability to save data off-chain (outside Ethereum's accounting) that is always available to the nodes contributes to this optimization.

The main benefit of this for users has to do with the reduction of commissions, both when using the Ethereum main network and its second layers..

In addition to the aforementioned improvements, Dencun also activates EIP-4844, an Ethereum improvement proposal that includes Proto-Danksharding. Named in honor of the developers who devised it, it is a method capable of making data structuring in Ethereum more efficient through various specific technical improvements.

Just a few minutes before the Dencun update was activated on Ethereum, one of the second layers (L2) of the network had technical problems. This is Blast, which spent about 40 minutes without processing new blocks.

'"The Blast mainnet stopped producing blocks due to issues related to Ethereum's Dencun upgrade. " The engineers are working to solve it," wrote the development team of the second layer network on the social network.

Shortly after that initial message, it was confirmed that Blast is now active again . The problem has been resolved and a more detailed report will be shared in the coming hours, they reported.

Blast is a second layer network that, like others of its type such as Arbitrum and Optimism, focuses on low-cost transaction processing. According to data from the l2beat site, it is the third L2 in total value locked (TVL), with more than USD 2.91 billion deposited . It is equivalent to a 7% market share among all L2s.