Ethereum's Dencun Upgrade Sparks Layer-2 Tokens Surge, Some Outages Overcome

By: Eliza Bennet

The launch of the Ethereum Dencun upgrade has prompted a significant surge in the prices of native tokens for layer-2 protocols, including Arbitrum, Polygon, and Optimism. The sector overall saw a growth of 5% in the last 24 hours, reaching a total market cap of $20.21 billion.

Tokens like Arbitrum’s ARB and Polygon’s MATIC have particularly surged by 10% and 4% respectively, marking a significant uptick. Notably, this comes amid Arbitrum's planned release of more than $1 billion ARB tokens and Polygons record of over 1 million daily active addresses for 20 consecutive days.

Amid these developments, Ethereum's layer-2 network Blast experienced an outage post Dencun’s launch, eventually overcome. Expectations are high for the upgrade itself, supposed to significantly reduce transaction costs, notably for layer-2 networks. The Dencun upgrade represents a big leap in Ethereum’s ecosystem resilience and performance, according to experts.

However, speculation exists about a potential Ether price correction following the Dencun upgrade. QCP Capital has voiced a cautiously optimistic sentiment towards ETH, also expressing concerns about possible market leverage impacts.