Ethereum Dencun Upgrade Faces Delays And Consensus Challenges, Reveal Developers

Ethereum client developers revealed this week that the much-awaited Dencun upgrade will not be deployed via a network hard fork before the end of 2023 due to consensus challenges.

During the All Core Developers call this week, consensus layer client teams shared they were not comfortable forking the Goerli on the mainnet because of the multi-level tasks still needed. This included the changes to the codebase from Prysm, an Ethereum client, that runs 45% of the consensus layer clients.

The prevailing sentiment among developers, as voiced out by Prysm developer Potuz, was that "there is no way we are forking mainnet in 2023."

The developer also noted he was "definitely not comfortable at all having a full client fork on Goerli," adding that he saw "very large and deep changes still being pushed in the branch."

This latest development came after a series of consistent consensus issues surfaced during the testing of the ten developer networks (devnets) over the past months.

None of the ten developer networks had met the satisfactory performance level, which triggered concerns about the possibility of executing the upgrade on time.

Despite being behind schedule, the Holešky testnet was successfully launched last month, but it was already apparent that the Dencun update might not get thoroughly tested if the team rolled it out by the end of the year.

Meanwhile, Tim Beiko, who ran the Ethereum core protocol meetings, forecasted the hard fork might take place in the latter half of November, although there was no specific date set for the same.

"We discussed whether teams would feel comfortable forking Goerli on the week of Nov 6 or 13 and it was pretty clear we could not have all teams ready by the first of these. Teams also want to avoid a fork happening during @EFDevconnect, which rules out the second," Beiko said in a tweet.

"This means that Goerli would more likely happen in the latter half of November, although no date was agreed to. EL clients felt it would be best to let CL teams set the date given they have more work to do, and so we'll continue that conversation on ACDC next week," he added.

Given the timeline, Beiko predicted that the mainnet might happen after the holidays.

"Realistically, with Goerli forking late November, and testnets usually requiring at least 2 weeks between them (so teams can fix any bugs and put out new releases), mainnet would happen after the holidays," adding, "Nothing here is set/final, of course, but there's at least a path being drawn towards mainnet!"