What are the project team and users busy with as Cancun upgrades?

Author: Grapefruit, ChainCatcher Editor: Marco, ChainCatcher

On March 13 at 21:54, the Cancun upgrade (Cancun-Deneb) will officially activate on the Ethereum mainnet at block height 269568 after numerous test calls and development network tests. This is the largest upgrade since the Ethereum merge.

This upgrade will introduce the highly anticipated "Proto-Danksharding" new scheme (i.e., EIP-4844 proposal), focusing on addressing Ethereum's scalability issues. By introducing the "Blob new data format," it allows large datasets to be stored in a compressed temporary format, reducing the cost of publishing data to the Ethereum mainnet, thereby lowering Layer 2 transaction gas fees and data availability costs, and advancing the progress of the Danksharding sharding plan.

As early as February, ChainCatcher published two articles related to the Cancun upgrade: "What Performance Improvements Will the Cancun Upgrade Bring to Ethereum?" and "With the Cancun Upgrade Approaching, A Review of Beneficial Tracks and 20 Projects."

The most direct beneficiaries of the Cancun upgrade are Layer 2 networks. The introduction of the Blob data format reduces the transaction fee costs for Layer 2 networks to below $0.02, just one-thousandth of the original cost.

As beneficiaries of the Cancun upgrade, how are Ethereum and various Layer 2 networks and the crypto community reacting on the eve of the upgrade? What actions are being taken?

For the Ethereum network, the Cancun upgrade will be rapidly adopted throughout the entire Ethereum ecosystem. By building a dedicated data on-chain channel for Rollup networks, it creates an independent fee market for transactions on the mainnet and Rollup data on-chain, alleviating the current congestion and high gas fee issues on the mainnet, thus opening a new era of efficiency and scalability for smart contract networks. The current ETH price has surpassed $4000, achieving seven consecutive weeks of gains, and is approaching the 2021 peak of $4868.

Regarding Layer 2, according to L2BEAT data, the number of operational Layer 2 networks has reached 45. Since the beginning of 2024, the TVL of the Layer 2 sector has climbed from an initial $20 billion, and as of March 13, the value of locked crypto assets in Layer 2 networks (TVL) has approached $39 billion, an increase of 11% in the past seven days.

Participating in the Cancun Upgrade Commemorative NFT Minting Becomes a Trend

To commemorate this significant moment, multiple project teams and the crypto community have launched commemorative NFTs to celebrate the Ethereum Cancun upgrade, and participating in the minting of commemorative NFTs has become a new way for the crypto community to pay tribute to this upgrade.

First, on February 24, Layer 2 network Linea's developer Consensys announced the issuance of the Cancun upgrade commemorative NFT "Evolved: Dencun NFT." This is the third commemorative NFT issued by Consensys for Ethereum upgrades, following those for the Ethereum merge and Shanghai upgrade.

This commemorative NFT will be divided into two versions: a public version open to all community members and a community version issued only to users holding one of the Ethereum merge or Shanghai upgrade NFTs. Users can mint for free on Linea and the Ethereum mainnet within 72 hours of the Cancun upgrade activation.

On March 11, the NFT community Nouns Community collaborated with DAO organizations Agora, The Line, and Stateful Works to create a one-minute NFT video short titled "The Delivery at Dawn," which opened for minting. The minting fee is 0.004844 ETH (approximately $19.5) and supports payment of minting fees on Ethereum, Zora, Op Mainnet, Base, Arbitrum, and Blast networks.

The short film aims to pay tribute to the activation of EIP-4844 on the Ethereum mainnet and the continuous work of core contributors. The NFT proceeds will be donated to the Ethereum core contributors funding program Protocol Guild, also referred to by users as the "EIP-4844 NFT movie."

The short film tells the story of a child running in a quiet town, where a courier arrives with precious goods. The townspeople work together to help unload the goods and release magical water, promoting the town's development and expanding possibilities. The townspeople express their gratitude and continue their management work. Several Layer 2 projects made cameo appearances as townspeople, including Arbitrum, Base, Farcaster, Optimism, Nouns, Polygon, Scroll, Starknet, Uniswap, ZkSync, and Zora.

Since the minting opened on March 11, the NFT video short has seen participation from 16,385 addresses, contributing 89.56 ETH, valued at $394,000, which will end on March 25.

Layer 2 Networks Are Ready for the Upgrade

After the implementation of the Ethereum Cancun upgrade, Layer 2 networks will not be able to enjoy the benefits immediately, as they need to manually integrate this new technology, and the time required for integration varies across different Layer 2 platforms. It is reported that completing integration work across all different Layer 2 platforms may take several months.

On March 11, user @nero_eth posted on social media that in the past 30 days, Arbitrum, Optimism, and Scroll collectively published over 10GB of calldata data to Ethereum Layer 1, exceeding the total of other Rollup solutions. This data will undergo significant changes after the Cancun upgrade.

So, what are the Layer 2 networks doing in response to the upgrade? The four major Layer 2 representatives have already prepared for the Cancun upgrade and are waiting for its arrival.

Among them, ZK representative zkSync completed the upgrade compatible with EIP-4844 on March 12, allowing users to immediately enjoy the low gas fees brought by the Blob data scheme when the Cancun upgrade is completed on the Ethereum mainnet.

On the same day, the Starknet Foundation announced that the Starknet mainnet will undergo the Starknet 0.13.1 upgrade during the Ethereum Dencun upgrade, which adds support for EIP-4844. This upgrade will transition Starknet from using the expensive calldata method to send data to Ethereum to a more cost-effective blobs transaction data type, significantly reducing costs and lowering data availability fees.

Regarding this upgrade, Polygon stated that its Polygon zkEVM is expected to launch EIP-4844 on the mainnet around May 1; the Polygon PoS chain will not benefit from EIP-4844 as it is not a Rollup solution; for Layer 2 chains built on the Polygon CDK, chains based on the Validium model are already cheap enough, even lower than the costs after Rollup adopts EIP-4844. Nevertheless, it will still support EIP-4844 later this year to reduce costs for chains using Ethereum for data availability.

The OP Rollup representatives Optimism and Arbitrum will launch the Ecotone and ArbOS20 upgrades on March 14, respectively, to implement the EIP changes of the Cancun upgrade.

Among them, Optimism will simultaneously launch EIP-4844 while starting the Ecotone upgrade, allowing all superchain networks within the Op ecosystem (such as Base, Zora, etc.) to directly benefit from EIP-4844.

Additionally, on the eve of the Cancun launch, the Optimism community deployed a tool called "Superchain Savings Estimator" (https://welovetheblobs.xyz/) to estimate gas fee comparisons after adopting the Blob data format. This tool can estimate how much the gas costs for Superchain Layer 2 built on the Op Stack may decrease.

For example, after adopting EIP-4844, the cost for users to mint an NFT on the Optimism mainnet will drop from $0.20 to $0.012.

On March 13, Metis announced that it would launch an upgrade the next day, becoming the first Ethereum Layer 2 to achieve decentralization of the sequencer.

However, it is important to note that the Arbitrum token ARB will experience a massive unlock on the third day after the Cancun upgrade, with Token Unlocks data showing that approximately 1.111 billion ARB tokens will be unlocked on March 16, accounting for over 76.6% of the total circulating supply, valued at over $2.3 billion.

In addition to the Layer 2 networks, the data website focused on the Layer 2 market, L2BEAT, has also quietly undergone an upgrade, adding a new DA (data availability) section today.