Ethereum client developers said they were not comfortable with a full client fork citing consensus issues on devnets that had not gone well.

The Dencun upgrade on Ethereum estimated to take place next month will likely not go ahead as planned, with the majority of developers raising concerns with executing the hard fork at this stage.

In the All Core Developers call on Thursday, consensus layer client teams said they did not feel comfortable forking the Goerli on the mainnet because of the varying levels of work still required. This included deeper changes to the codebase from the Ethereum client Prysm, which runs 45% of consensus layer clients.

Last month, Ethereum’s Holesky testnet experienced an error during a launch attempt – an issue that developers attributed to a mismatch in fork parameters. 

“I’m definitely not comfortable at all having a full client fork on Goerli,” said Prysm developer Potuz.

“I see very large and deep changes still being pushed in the branch,” Potuz added.

Meanwhile, execution layer clients are ready to move forward with the fork, especially considering Dencun will be the last fork, with one developer on the execution side saying “we are in a pretty good place, a lot of things are also on Master now.”

According to Tim Beiko, the developer who runs the core protocol meetings for Ethereum, the hard fork would most likely take place in the latter half of November, as opposed to the first week, although no date has been agreed to at this time.

This means that Goerli would more likely happen in the latter half of November, although no date was agreed to. EL clients felt it would be best to let CL teams set the date given they have more work to do, and so we’ll continue that conversation on ACDC next week.

— timbeiko.eth ☀️ (@TimBeiko) October 26, 2023

The Dencun upgrade would introduce the much anticipated Proto-danksharding feature to the Ethereum blockchain with EIP-4844. The feature will increase throughput for Layer 2 networks by introducing “blob-carrying transactions” for more data storage.