U.Today - teased a new timeline for the Dencun mainnet upgrade at the most recent All Core Developers Execution (ACDE) call held on Oct. 26.
During the week, precisely on Monday, Oct. 23, developers launched Devnet-10 to test the Cancun/Deneb (Dencun) upgrade. The devnet was set up with 330,000 active validators to force a change in the validator churn limit.
A few bugs were found on the devnet 10 network, one relating to syncing with Prysm and another to deposit handling on Teku, both of which are already being addressed. There were also some issues related to builder-produced blocks.
During the most recent ACDE meeting, developers discussed the timing for the introduction of Devnet-11, the Goerli shadow fork, and Dencun activation on Goerli.
Developers decided to initiate a shadow fork of the Goerli testnet in addition to Devnet-11. By definition, shadow forks are a kind of developer-focused test network done by forking a live network with a small number of nodes.
From all indications, Goerli will not have the Dencun upgrade implemented until late November at the earliest.
Given that testnet activations for have typically occurred two weeks apart, following the activation of Dencun on Goerli in late November, two testnet upgrades are projected to take place on Sepolia and Holesky in early and mid-December, respectively.
This timeline is based on the assumption that no serious issues are discovered between testnet activations. Even the perfect timeline would position Dencun's mainnet activation sometime after the holidays in late December, according to Tim Beiko.
Mainnet activation of Dencun likely after holidays: Tim Beiko
In a tweet, Ethereum core developer stated, "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."He further added: "Nothing here is set or final, of course, but there's at least a path being drawn towards Mainnet. By next week's ACDC, we'll launch devnet-11 with all clients being setup with mev-boost and try to run a Goerli shadow fork."