Ethereum Developers Maintains March 2023 as Launch Date for Shanghai Upgrade
Plans to launch the much-anticipated Shanghai upgrade surfaces, enabling withdrawals of over 16 million ETH.
Core Ethereum developers have announced their goal remains unshaken towards launching Shanghai and authorizing withdrawal options by March. The group recently launched a developer network named “devnet 2”, which was designed to engage client teams to tweak the ETH withdrawal process in the right way. According to one of the developers, the network launch was without a hitch except for some expected hiccups.
Ethereum Shanghai Update
The anticipated Shanghai upgrade will be based on the network’s withdrawal capability. Ethereum’s previous upgrade “the merge” only transformed the network from a Proof of Work (PoW) mechanism to a Proof of Stake (PoW) mechanism. The newly added PoW mechanism will allow Ethereum validators to verify transactions and keep the network secure. These participants will earn newly minted ETH as a reward for staking. Prior to the merge, users were given the opportunity to merge and a total of $22.7 billion worth of ETH (over 16 million ETH) was staked. Unfortunately, these staked ETH cannot be retrieved at the moment.
The withdrawal option would be enabled once the Shanghai upgrade has been completed. Thereafter, members of the Ethereum community can proceed to unstaked their portion of the total staked ETH. Initially, the Shanghai upgrade was meant to feature proto-danksharding, a data-sampling process that would make layer-2 transactions on Ethereum substantially cheaper and faster. However, due to the slow development progress of proto-danksharding, the Shanghai upgrade will be launched without this additional feature. In light of the roadmap, proto-danksharding would be released later this year.
Developers have decided to further delay EOF, a timely update to the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). For about two years, the EVM has received no update as it was delayed to prevent complications. EVM is the underlying mechanism behind deploying smart contracts. Tokens powering staking protocols: Lido Finance and Rocket Poll has spiked up in price in a anticipation for the ETH withdrawal capability.
