The much-anticipated Shanghai upgrade of the Ethereum network that allows withdrawal of ETH staking is now scheduled for April 2023.
Ethereum developers have chosen March 14 as the scheduled time to launch the Shanghai hard fork on the Goerli testnet – the final “rehearsal” for this much-anticipated ETH staking unlocking upgrade. If all goes well, Shanghai will be on the Ethereum mainnet in mid-April.
If the launch of Shanghai on Goerli goes over smoothly, Ethereum stakeholders can expect a mainnet launch of the upgrade during the 2nd week of April.
— Christine Kim (@christine_dkim) March 2, 2023
Previously, the Ethereum team decided to choose March 2023 as the time to implement the Shanghai hard fork. However, the network needs to go through the full range of Sepolia, Zhejiang and Goerli testnets. Each trial was spaced 3 weeks apart. Therefore, Shanghai will continue to be delayed to April, as Kyptos has commented.
The Shanghai hard fork is a major milestone that will bring many changes to the Ethereum network. Shanghai, also known as “Shapella” by the ETH development team, is the next upgrade in the following predetermined roadmap. The Merge. One of the key proposals on the Shanghai hard fork is EIP-4895, which unlocks the huge amount of ETH staking for Ethereum 2.0 belonging to The Merge.
After this blockchain switched from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, transactions were validated by users who staked ETH to accumulate rewards. Since open ETH 2.0 staking contract in December 2020, a whopping $28.7 billion worth of ETH (increasing steadily) has been locked up. This amount represents about 14.5% of the total ETH in circulation.
According to Deccrypt, many investors have chosen to stake their ETH on intermediary staking platforms like Lido and the exchanges Coinbase, Kraken and Binance to date. All four of these companies provide staking services and pay passive rewards to customers. Data Dune Analytics Statistically, the amount of ETH staking on the 4 platforms above currently accounts for 56% of the total ETH staking on the network.
But the core developers of Ethereum are still focusing on Shanghai. The team even removed other “improvements” and avoided minor technical tweaks to speed up the upgrade as planned.
Earlier this week, Sepolia test network successfully deployed upgraded Shanghai, also known as Shapella. However, there are still some problems with old client versions.
Synthetic Kyptos
