What’s next for Ethereum: What’s the Cancun upgrade?

The long-awaited Ethereum Shanghai upgrade has been successfully completed, and pledgers can finally withdraw funds! This is also another big step forward since Ethereum successfully transitioned from PoW to PoS in September 2022!

So what is the next step along the Ethereum roadmap?

Cancun Upgrade

The Cancun upgrade is the next upgrade after the Ethereum Shanghai upgrade.

The reason why the upgrade is called Cancun is because it is named after the city where the Ethereum Developer Conference was held. It is already a common practice for Ethereum to upgrade. This conference happens to be in the Mexican city of Cancun ((cancun)), so it is named Cancun upgrade. Previously, there were Berlin upgrade, London upgrade and this one. Shanghai upgrade and so on.

There is a short story behind naming the city: Ethereum has had a total of 22 important milestone nodes since the release of the white paper in 2013, most of which are related to upgrades. After the Istanbul upgrade in 2019, many people in the community have been discussing what to name the next upgrade. Among them, there was a post on Github that had a heated discussion on this issue.

Some want to use the periodic table of elements, some want to use the World of Warcraft section, as well as constellations, myths, musical instruments, etc. Someone proposed to name it after the city where the Ethereum Developer Conference was held. This suggestion was finally adopted, so subsequent upgrades were named after the city where the conference was held, so there were the Berlin upgrade, the London upgrade, and the subsequent Shanghai upgrade.

Every upgrade will include several very important proposals. The purpose of these proposals is basically to better reconcile the three difficult problems of the blockchain to improve performance and user experience.

Taking Ethereum as an example, an illustration of the three difficult problems of the blockchain, source network

Cancun Upgrade Content

In addition to unlocking ETH pledges and withdrawals, the Ethereum Shanghai upgrade on April 13 also originally considered improving other proposals, such as the improvement proposal EIP on "proto-danksharding" -4844.

However, in order to achieve better upgrade effects and reduce delays, at the core developers conference in December last year, Ethereum core developers reached an agreement and decided that the Shanghai upgrade mainly includes withdrawals, a small amount of EOF, etc., mainly Just withdraw money without delay.

The "EIP-4844" that was delayed in the Shanghai upgrade will become the center of the next upgrade of Ethereum, the "Cancun upgrade", also known as "proto-danksharding".

This proposal aims to enable temporary storage and retrieval of off-chain data through Ethereum nodes to meet the data and storage needs of blockchain applications.
Simply put, if EIP-4844 is successfully activated, it is expected to significantly reduce the transaction costs of Layer 2 solutions (including Optimism and Arbitrum).


Of course, in addition to the EIP-4844 (sharding upgrade) that has been confirmed to be included, the Cancun upgrade is also considering some other proposals, which specifically include:
●EIP-4788EIP-4788 is conducive to the optimization of the pledge pool, re-pledge protocol, MEV and other related components.
●EIP-6914EIP-6914, this proposal will help reduce the infinite growth of the validator list.
●PR 3175 PR 3175, this proposal will prevent punished validators from proposing blocks when they exit the queue.
●EIP-6493EIP-6493, this EIP is part of updating the Ethereum serialization format to achieve cross-layer consistency.

summary

If the Shanghai upgrade is good for the LSD narrative, then from the current point of view, the Cancun upgrade will be good for the Layer 2 narrative to a large extent.

The Cancun upgrade is expected to be carried out later this year, and the specific time is subject to the official date. Regarding the Cancun upgrade, which tracks do you think will benefit? Welcome to leave a message in the comment area

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