In less than three weeks, blockchains built on Optimism’s OP Stack technology will receive an Ecotone update. It is expected to go live the next day, following Dencun’s mainnet activation, and will introduce blobs and EIP 4844 to one of the most significant EVM L2.
OP Chains welcome EIP 4844, dApps expect up to 100x lower fees
The Ecotone update will become available in the Optimism environment on March 14, 2024, at 12:01 a.m. UTC. It will add EIP 4844, or “Proto-Danksharding,” to OP Mainnet-like blockchains. Node operators must thus change their software, according to an official statement from OP Labs.
Node operators must connect to new endpoints quickly after Ecotone activation; bulk transactions will be delivered as 4844 blobs, which can only be recovered from Beacon nodes.
Blobs are brand-new data instances that will be introduced with the Cancun-Deneb (Dencun) update in Ethereum (ETH) in mid-March.
https://x.com/OPLabsPBC/status/1761069984703230112?s=20
As previously reported by U.Today, Ethereum (ETH) engineers announced yesterday that March 13 is the definitive date for mainnet Dencun activation. The improvement will improve Ethereum (ETH) data logistics’ resource efficiency; dominating L2s will benefit the most from the new system.
Velodrome Finance, one of the most sophisticated DeFis on Optimism, has stated their predictions for the imminent Ecotone activation:
On March 14th, Optimism will become significantly cheaper. EIP-4844 will be implemented immediately on OPstack chains, lowering L2 user costs by 10-100 times. Get ready for a new era of optimism.
According to the L2Fees tracker, Optimism is the fourth-cheapest L2 rollup on Ethereum (ETH) as of February 24, 2024.
What’s next for Ethereum after Dencun?
Sending ETH with Optimism costs only $0.14; only zkSync and Loopring provide cheaper transfers. In terms of TVL, Optimism is the second largest L2, accounting for 26% of net funds locked in the sector.
Meanwhile, the Ethereum developer community has begun considering the future stages of EVM development. Ethereum (ETH) is moving towards the Surge phase of its ambitious road map after replacing blockspace-intensive calldata with blobs at Dencun.
The following phases of its development — the Verge, Purge, and Splurge — are becoming closer as Ethereum’s Electra hard fork takes shape. Electra is expected to become online in late 2024 or early 2025, enhancing validator deposits and changing the rules of execution layer services.
