Ethereum’s upcoming Shanghai upgrade is scheduled to go live on March 2023, ETH core developers revealed at a recently concluded meeting.
The Ethereum Foundation published a pre-Shanghai testnet for the official release on October 14, 2022.
The Ethereum Improvement Proposals [EIPs], commonly known as “Shandong,” is to be tested and polished on this testnet before being released as part of the official Shanghai Update, TronWeekly reported earlier.
The upgrade is set to deploy key updates and elemental changes in the blockchain’s EVM functionalities.
One of them is bringing down the gas fees for layer-2 solutions such as Polygon, and Optimism, running on top of Ethereum.
Prior to the Merge, all those who were interested in joining the new PoS Beacon chain were required to stake a particular amount of ETH into a deposit smart contract, which remained locked in even after the Merge.
However, with the Shanghai Upgrade formally known as Ethereum Improvement Proposal 4895, we might witness the lifting of the lock-in and allow people who have staked their ETH tokens to unstake them.
With intentions to launch a public testnet on December 15 or December 16, 2022, developer Marius van der Wijden stated in the zoom meeting that full and partial withdrawals were functioning on two private Eth testnets.
After van der Wijden’s update, teams developing popular Eth clients updated the group on their readiness.
Geth, Besus, Erigon, and Nethermind are well-known implementations of execution clients, while Lighthouse, Lodestar, Nimbus, Prysm, and Teku are well-known implementations of consensus clients, according to the Ethereum Foundation.
Next, the developers spoke on whether incorporating EIP-4844 with the Shanghai upgrade in March 2023 would lead to delays.
Ethereum Core Devs Decided To Postpone This Ahead Of The Fork
Also known as Proto-Danksharding, EIP-4844 introduces a new kind of transaction type to Eth that accepts “blobs” of data to be persisted in the beacon node for a short period of time.
Most of them concurred that implementing withdrawals should be the top priority and postponed EIP-4844 until the following upgrade.
If all client development teams did not have their code ready to be tested by January 5, 2023, the all-core developer’s team decided to exclude Ethereum Virtual Machine Object Format [EOF] from the Shanghai upgrade.
For the uninitiated, the EOF upgrade makes changes to the execution layer of the Eth network. The team announced it to host its second meeting on Jan. 19, 2023.