Cancun upgrade ushered in substantial progress, Layer 2 helped ETH Fang start a "turnaround"?

By Nancy, PANews

ETH Fang is leading the Layer 2 track to blow the horn of counterattack. On the one hand, the latest ETH Workshop Core Developer Conference announced that Dencun will be activated in January next year, and it is expected to set a Goerli fork date early next year, which may inject new vitality into the Layer 2 track. On the other hand, Layer2 airdrops such as Starknet and Blast are also expected to ignite the community’s enthusiasm for interaction.

Dencun upgrade plan will be activated in January next year, and the Layer2 sector will rise

As another important upgrade after ETH Fang Shanghai, the Dencun upgrade has finally made a substantial breakthrough.

According to ETH core developer timbeiko.eth, in the minutes of the 176th ACDE meeting, the developers discussed the post-state of Dencun and the timeline for the testnet, as well as the planning for the next network upgrade.

According to the meeting discussions, the Dencun upgrade found and fixed bugs in several clients including Reth and Lighthouse in the Devnet #12上的测试进展顺利. At the moment, with the exception of the Prysm Ethereum Client, which is expected to join Devnet #12测试外 in the next two weeks, almost all of the rest of the clients have been tested.

At the same time, the meeting noted that the development team is ready to fork the testnet, with a large Goerli shadow fork planned in the coming weeks. The developers have unanimously agreed that if things go well, a Goerli fork date will be set in early 2024, with the goal of activating the Dencun upgrade on the network in January of next year.

In addition, the meeting briefly discussed the planning of the Prague/Electra network upgrade, with two potential topics for the next upgrade being Verkle Tries on EL and DAS on CL, which still need to be “further studied”. It is reported that the last ACDE meeting in 2023 will be held at 22:00 Beijing time on December 21.

Dencun refers to the Cancun upgrade, which focuses on the ETH execution layer, and the Deneb upgrade, which focuses on the protocol layer upgrade, which aims to improve the scalability, security, and availability of the network. Among them, the long-awaited Cancun upgrade is the key to the further expansion of ETH, which can open a new phase of data storage and retrieval capabilities, thereby reducing costs and increasing efficiency for Layer 2.

However, due to the complexity of the upgrade protocol following the ETH Merger, the Dencun upgrade was also postponed several times until the recent 123rd ETH Workshop Core Developer Consensus (ACDC) conference call revealed that the Cancun/Deneb upgrade had been #12上激活 on Devnet on November 30.

Although the latest conference shows that the official mainnet upgrade time of Dencun has not yet been determined, Goerli is the closest testnet to the ETH mainnet, which has greatly boosted the confidence of Layer 2 and even the entire ETH ecosystem. You must know that not long ago, BTC and Solana and other ecological performances were eye-catching, and the crypto community once had a war of words around the value of ETH.

Affected by this, ETH and Layer 2 tokens rose. CoinGecko data shows that in the past 24 hours, the ETH market price map was $2,300, and the total market capitalization of the Layer 2 sector rose by nearly 7.8%.

Multiple spoilers enter the Layer 2 track, and the airdrop will capture more traffic

Layer 2 is emerging as one of the narrative protagonists of the crypto bull market. According to Rootdata, there are about 91 Layer 2 projects in the market, of which 16 are in the testnet stage.

In the past few months, the Layer 2 track has ushered in a number of new forces to enter the game, and there is continuous news of financing. For example, in November this year, the interest-bearing Layer2 Blast announced by the founder of Blur received $20 million in financing, and due to the introduction of the point airdrop gameplay, its TVL has exceeded $800 million in less than a month after its launch; In the same month, OKX announced the launch of the new ZK Layer2 network X1 using Polygon CDK, which will launch its mainnet in the first quarter of 2024. Game studio Lattice announced the launch of Redstone, an L2 chain built on the OP Stack; The Nil Foundation, a blockchain cryptography company, has also launched zkSharding, a ZK-Rollup L2 network that supports sharding; Layer 2 network Kinto announced the closing of two rounds of funding totaling $5 million; In December, Ten, the L2 Rollup project in ETH, completed a $7.5 million financing round with participation from Republic Capital and others. In addition, Paypal and Kraken are also planning to enter the Layer 2 track.

With the popularity of Layer 2, the upcoming airdrop plans of multiple Layer 2 projects will also bring more heat and traffic to the project and even the entire track. For example, the Starknet Foundation recently confirmed that it has conducted an airdrop snapshot, and the airdrop plan will be announced after it is finalized, and the STRK token contract was deployed 379 days ago, and the first community L2 network, ZKFair, announced that its testnet has been officially launched, and will airdrop 100% of the tokens to all community users in the form of gas fee Airdrop after the mainnet is launched.

Judging from the data, a large amount of money is continuing to flow into Layer 2. According to L2BEAT data, as of December 8, the TVL of Layer 2 in ETH Fang rose to $16.14 billion, an increase of 24.9% in the past 30 days, and an increase of more than 3.5 times from the beginning of the year.

With the arrival of the Dencun upgrade, ETH Fang will usher in an important turning point in the Layer2 narrative of ETH Fang, and the optimization of transaction fees and transaction experience will expand more application scenarios and capture more users.