Been thinking back on that Dencun upgrade from early 2024 - it was actually a pretty significant moment for Ethereum scaling. The EIP-4844 launch date of March 13, 2024 marked when proto-danksharding finally went live on mainnet, and it fundamentally changed how L2s could handle transaction costs.

What made it interesting was the timing and execution. Ethereum Foundation had announced the mainnet activation would happen at block 269568, which hit around 21:55 Beijing time that day. The core developers like eric.eth were hyping it up because everyone knew what was coming - those temporary data blobs that EIP-4844 introduced were going to be a game changer.

The real story though? Transaction fees on L2s actually dropped significantly. We're talking from several dollars down to pennies in many cases. That $0.01 figure everyone cited wasn't just hype - it reflected what users were actually experiencing on rollups. The whole point of EIP-4844 was to give L2s a cheaper data layer without needing a full danksharding implementation, and it delivered.

Looking back now, that EIP-4844 launch date was one of those inflection points that people underestimated at the time. It wasn't as flashy as a major price move, but for anyone actually using Layer 2s, it was transformative. The upgrade showed that Ethereum was serious about solving the scaling problem, not just talking about it.