- The Ethereum Dencun upgrade has gone live with EIP-4844, promising cost-cutting benefits for Layer 2 chains.
- A lead Polygon developer has explained how Polygon-powered the upgrade will impact chains.
- Not all Polygon chains stand to benefit from EIP-4844.
After months of anticipation, the Dencun upgrade finally went live on the Ethereum mainnet on Wednesday, March 13, setting the stage for Ethereum’s danksharding scaling roadmap. In the near term, however, Layer 2 chains will feel the biggest impact of this upgrade as it introduces new features through EIP-4844 to lower the fees on these protocols dramatically. However, when and how these impacts will be felt varies from chain to chain, as each chain has to carry out separate upgrades.
Polygon Labs Developer Relations Engineer Jarrod Watts has taken to X to break down what users of Polygon-powered chains can expect.
Not All Polygon (MATIC) Chains to Benefit?
In an X post on Wednesday, March 13, Watts outlined whether and how the recently launched Ethereum Dencun Upgrade would impact multiple Polygon-powered chains. According to the developer, the Polygon zkEVM chain would be the first to benefit from the EIP-4844 upgrade, setting a testnet launch for April 2024 and a mainnet launch for May 2024 as part of the network’s “Feijoa” upgrade.
Watts disclosed that, in the status quo, 80% of zkEVM fees came from storing data within calldata on Ethereum. With the planned switch to blobs, the developer asserted that users could expect two-to-five-fold fee reductions.
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Blobs are cheap, temporary storage designed to hold information from Layer 2 transactions introduced by EIP-4844. Verifying these blobs is faster than verifying entire blocks, which speeds up Layer 2 processing. Their temporary nature also ensures that they do not overload the Ethereum network with data, further driving down costs. Blob-carrying transactions are also processed on a separate market to ensure low fees.
Moving away from the Polygon zkEVM, Polygon Labs’ Watts stressed that the Polygon PoS chain would not be impacted by the EIP-4844 upgrade as it is not currently a rollup. While the chain eventually intends to transition to a zkEVM validium, it would leverage off-chain data availability solutions and not store data on Ethereum.
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Watts noted that the outcome would be the same for other Polygon CDK validium chains. For Polygon CDK zkEVMs, however, he noted that developers would roll out EIP-4844 support later in the year.
On the Flipside
- Competing scaling solutions like Optimism, Base, and Starknet are already reaping the benefits of the Dencun upgrade, with users reporting dramatically lower fees.
- Despite the promise of blobs, some experts have cautioned that Layer 2 fees may rise again as more chains jump in and the blobs fee market becomes more saturated.
Why This Matters
The Dencun upgrade is the largest the Ethereum network has undergone since The Merge. The upgrade promises massive cost-cutting benefits for Layer 2 chains.
Read these for more on the Ethereum Dencun upgrade:
What Is the Ethereum Dencun Upgrade, and Why Is It Important?
Here’s What Ethereum Dencun Changes; What’s Up Next for ETH?
