The upcoming Ethereum Dencun upgrade, scheduled for launch at 14:00 UTC today, March 13, has sparked a significant increase in the prices of native tokens for layer-2 protocols such as Arbitrum, Polygon, and Optimism.

Data from CryptoSlate indicates that the sector has surged by about 5% in the last 24 hours, reaching a total market capitalization of $20.21 billion, maintaining a consistent upward trend of 10% observed throughout the week.

In the past 24 hours, Arbitrum's ARB token surged by approximately 10% to reach $2.18, coinciding with the planned release of over $1 billion ARB tokens by the team this week. Polygon network's MATIC token witnessed a 4% uptick to $1.23, marking its highest value since March 2023, concurrent with a notable increase in active addresses on the Polygon PoS chain.

Similarly, Optimism's OP token rose by 2.26% to $4.5, a significant milestone considering its starting point at around $3.5 earlier this month, following a private sale of 19.5 million OP tokens by the Optimism Foundation last week, which includes a 2-year vesting period. Loopring's LRC experienced a more modest gain of 1.34% during the same period, currently trading at $0.43140 as of press time.

The surge in token prices can be attributed to anticipation surrounding the Dencun upgrade, which aims to significantly improve Ethereum's network scalability by integrating EIP-4844, known as proto-dank sharding, introducing blob-type transactions to lower transaction costs for layer-2 chains, enabling mass scalability via layer-2 rollups by minimizing data availability expenses.

Mara Schmiedt, CEO of Alluvial, sees the Dencun upgrade as a significant advancement in Ethereum's ecosystem resilience and performance, indicating an optimistic future driven by Ethereum's rollup-centric scalability model and rapid proliferation and transaction growth on layer 2.