Ethereum’s pinnacle performance upgrade dubbed danksharding has received a clearer timeline after devs circled early February for its final testnet stages – potentially setting the stage for a mainnet launch by March.
A post by the Ethereum Foundation confirmed the next incremental upgrades to Sepolia and Holesky testnets are scheduled for January 30th and February 7th respectively. Assuming smooth sailing, those key milestones tee up deploying danksharding to production later next month.
The upgrade promises massive scalability gains for Ethereum, where network congestion has long crippled speeds and inflated costs. Through features called proto-dank sharding and EIP-4844, capacity should vault over 100,000 transactions per second.
It does so in part by radically improving performance and fees for layer 2 solutions running parallel to Ethereum. Research firm Messari claims most Ethereum activity already occurs on layer 2 platforms like Optimism.
After Ethereum’s move last year from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, danksharding represents the next leg up towards cementing the network as the dominant smart contract blockchain. If the given timeline holds, cheaper, faster transactions are imminent.
