Ethereum validators don't have to wait anymore as Shapella is being moved to the Mainnet soon. In the All Core Developers Execution Layer 157 call on Thursday the Ethereum developers announced the date for Shapella hard fork update to be on 4/12/2023, 10:27:35 PM.

The Shapella upgrade states the completion of Ethereum’s full transition to a Proof-of-stake (PoS) network from Proof-of-work (PoW) network, and it will enable staked ETH withdrawals.

Ethereum Shapella Upgrade is centered arround ETHWithdrawal. It has 4 EIPs including 1 for EVM update.

In addition to EIP-4895, Shanghai upgrade will deploy 3 more EIPs on the Execution Layer.

EIP-3651: Warm COINBASE - Direct COINBASE payments are becoming increasingly popular but accessing COINBASE is overpriced because the address is initially cold under the access list framework introduced in EIP-2929 (Berlin upgrade). This proposal will make COINBASE address warm at the start of transaction execution making it cheaper for users.

EIP-3855: PUSH0 instruction - Many instructions expect offsets as inputs, which in a number of cases are zero. This proposal will introduce the PUSH0 (0x5f) instruction, which pushes the constant value 0 onto the stack. This is a useful feature upgrade for clients & contract developers.

EIP-3860: Limit and meter initcode - This is an extension to EIP-170, to limit the maximum size of initcode and ensure initcode is fairly charged (most importantly cost is proportional to initcode’s length). It will simplify EVM engines by the explicit limits and have a cost system that is extendable in the future.

Capella upgrade will introduce the following changes to Consensus clients:

  • Full and partial withdrawals for validators.
  • BLSToExecutionChange messages, which allow validators using a BLS_WITHDRAWAL_PREFIX to update it to an ETH1_ADDRESS_WITHDRAWAL_PREFIX, a prerequisite for withdrawals.
  • Independent state and block historical accumulators, replacing the original singular historical roots.

Prior to the mainnet release, the Ethereum Foundation released on October 14, 2022 a pre-Shanghai testnet for the same. This testnet, also known as ‘Shandong’ will be used to test and finalize the Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) that are expected to be rolled out in the actual Shanghai Update.

Earlier in September 2022 Merge took place in which Ethereum switched to a PoS consensus mechanism, within which the network began using validators instead of miners. Validator can be anyone with at least 32 ETH available to stake or pledge to the network. It does also allow validators with smaller amounts of ETH to participate through staking pools or cryptocurrency exchanges.

Ever since the Merge happened Ethereum developers have performed multiple testes in order to ensure that staked ETH withdrawals would function properly. All tests on Ethereum’s testnets ran smoothly, though the last testnet hard fork on Goerli experienced low participation rates because validator nodes didn't upgrade on time.

Before validators involved into Ethereum’s PoS blockchain, they were made aware that their staked ETH and any rewards would remain locked up until Shanghai, that is now planned to take place on April 12. Many validators have had their funds locked up since December 2020, when Ethereum’s PoS Beacon Chain launched.

As stated above before the Ethereum Merge, all those who became a validator in the PoS Ethereum Beacon chain, had to stake a certain amount of ETH to a deposit smart contract which was locked in with the contract even after the Merge happened. But, now with the Shapella Upgrade, those who had staked their ETH tokens may be able to unstake them.

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