Cancun upgrade schedule finalized: Goerli in two weeks, Mainnet activation can be expected in February?

February Mainnet can be expected?

Written by Azuma, Odaily

On the evening of January 4th, the 178th Ethereum Core Developers Executive Meeting (ACDE #178) was held online, which finalized the proposed Testnet Dencun upgrade timeline proposed at ACDE #177 on December 21, and discussed priorities for future Pectra upgrade planning.

Odaily Planet Daily Note: The Dencun upgrade is actually a collective name for the two upgrades of Deneb and Cancun, the former focuses on the Consensus layer, and the latter focuses on the execution layer, of which Cancun translates to the long-awaited "Cancun" of Ethereum and Layer 2 communities. In the same way, the Pectra upgrade is actually a collective name for the Prague and Electra upgrades.

ACDE #178 was moderated not by the familiar core developer Tim Beiko (who will return at ACDE #179), but by the Geth team developer lightclient, who, according to lightclient's minutes this morning, reached a Consensus on the Testnet schedule for the Dencun upgrade last night.

The developers agreed that January 17 will be the date to activate the Dencun upgrade on the Goerli testnet, and that January 30 and February 7 will be the dates for the Sepolia Testnet and Holesky Testnet upgrades, respectively.

While most developers consider this timeline to be a little aggressive, it is generally acceptable, but developer potuz1 explicitly questioned that the upgrade interval between the Goerli Testnet and the Sepolia Testnet (13 days) was too short or sufficient to observe possible problems.

In order to quickly respond to possible problems after the Goerli Testnet upgrade, developers have decided to hold ACDE #179 on January 18th, and if the Goerli Testnet does have problems in the first 24 hours after the upgrade, developers will have the opportunity to revisit the subsequent timeline.

It is worth mentioning that the timing of the Mainnet upgrade was not mentioned in the lightclient minutes, but the developers at ACDE #177 discussed deploying the upgrade to the Mainnet as early as the end of February, and given that ACDE #178 did not delay the Testnet upgrade schedule, ideally we can still maintain that timeline.

In addition to the Dencun upgrade, which is currently the most popular topic in the market, the developers also discussed the priority of the next Pectra upgrade.

When it comes to the Pectra upgrade, developers are conflicted about whether to focus on verkle before upgrading, or whether to improve verkle and move forward with smaller features first. While the vast majority of developers believe that verkle is a priority, the developers of the Reth client believe that a small feature upgrade should be made first.

lightclient also mentions that verkle is at least a one-year job, and if you choose to focus on verkle, there will be no new executive layer (EL) functionality for at least 12-24 months. Developers will have more discussions and presentations on this upgrade in the coming ACDE sessions.

All in all, the biggest significance of ACDE #178 is that the Testnet schedule for the Dencun upgrade has been finalized, and on January 17th, let's witness the new phase of the Ethereum ecosystem from Goerli.