Ethereum nears Dencun upgrade with Holesky test deployment

• The final Ethereum testnet has gotten upgraded.
• Ethereum’s TVL has added nearly $3 billion in the last three days.

Recent reports indicate that Ethereum’s [ETH] developers have reached the penultimate stage of the Dencun mainnet upgrade.

Holesky gets an Ethereum upgrade

As of a recent announcement from an Ethereum developer, the anticipated final deployment has successfully occurred.

On the 7th of December, the Dencun upgrade was deployed on the Holesky testnet, marking the conclusive testnet deployment preceding the mainnet launch.

The phased upgrade implementation saw prior deployments on the Goerli testnet on the 17th of January and the Sepolia testnet on the 30th of January.

Additionally, Ethereum’s last significant upgrade, Shapella, took place in March 2023, allowing users and validators to withdraw their staked ETH.

The upcoming upgrade, featuring Proto-dank sharding (EIP-4844), will enable the temporary storage and retrieval of off-chain data by Ethereum nodes.

This enhancement will significantly reduce decentralized applications (dApp) transaction costs on the network.

The benefits will extend to Layer 2 rollup chains, fostering more cost-effective and scalable data processing.

Ethereum sees an increase in TVL

Despite the anticipation that the Dencun upgrade will result in reduced transaction fees on Layer 2 solutions (L2s), there has been a recent rise in the Total Value Locked (TVL) on the Ethereum network. 

According to AMBCrypto’s examination of DefiLlama’s data, the TVL began its growth trajectory around October 2023.

Notably, a more substantial increase has been observed recently, with the value rising by about $3 billion between the 5th and the 7th of February.

The chart also showed that as of the 5th of February, the TVL was around $32.8 billion. At the time of this writing, it had risen to around $35.3 billion.

Source: DefiLlama

ETH maintains new price region

On the daily timeframe chart, Ethereum experienced a notable rise of over 3% on 6 February. This marked the first such increase in the month, taking its price to around $2,372.

Realistic or not, here’s ETH market cap in BTC’s terms

At the time of this writing, Ethereum was still holding within the same price range. Also, a minor decline of less than 1% could be observed.

The recent upswing had also moved its trend above the neutral line on the Relative Strength Index.

Source: Trading View