Date Set for Ethereum’s Critical Update

Ethereum developers have announced a date for the highly anticipated Shanghai update. The developers pointed to the April 12 date for the update, also called Shapella, which will complete the proof-of-stake phase of the post-Merge network. With this upgrade, Recommendation for Improvement (EIP) 4895 will be applied to the Ethereum mainnet, allowing withdrawals of ETH staked and rewards earned on the network since December 2020. This feature was disabled for the security of Ethereum’s transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake in September.

The lack of disclosure about locked assets after the consensus mechanism change in Ethereum caused investors to worry for a while. Then, towards the end of the year, the anxious wait came to an end after the developers determined the roadmap for the Shanghai update. The developers held the last of their 2-week routine meetings yesterday, and in this meeting, it was decided that the upgrade would take place on the specified date at 620.9536 epoch. It was previously announced that the critical update would take place in March. However, it was announced that the upgrade was postponed to April, on the grounds that some bugs should be debugged.

There have been 3 testnet runs since February for this major update. Numerous trials were conducted on the Sepolia, Zhejiang, and most recently Goerli testnet, which was completed this week. On all three testnets, validators successfully completed ETH withdrawals.