The Shanghai hard fork has been pushed to April 12, marking another delay for the highly anticipated Ethereum network upgrade.
The decision was arrived at during the All-Core Developers Executions layer #157 call held on March 16 to allow for further testing and development of the updates, in a bid to ensure a smooth and successful upgrade.
As reported, the Shanghai upgrade was previously scheduled for March, but the developers pushed it to early April. Indeed, on Thursday, Tim Beiko, a core developer with the Ethereum Foundation, confirmed a soft date stating that Shanghai is expected to go live on April 12 at approximately 10:27:35pm UTC, epoch 620,9536.
“Teams were ready to move to mainnet, and so we’ve agreed to fork on slot 6209536, scheduled for April 12, 10:27 PM UTC. Expect client releases in about a week and a full announcement ~10 days from now,” said Beiko.
On Tuesday, the Shapella upgrade, which allows validators to withdraw their staked ETH from 2020 was executed successfully on the Goerli testnet paving the way for staked ETH withdrawals to activate on the mainnet. However, despite its success, the upgrade faced some issues, as not all validators participated as expected. Tim Beiko noted that the issues arose due to some validators not having upgraded rather than an issue with Shappela. Nevertheless, once this was fixed, the network continued to run smoothly.
The upgrade to the Shanghai mainnet includes the integration of five Ethereum Improvement Proposals, among which is EIP-4985. This particular proposal allows for staked Ether withdrawals on the Beacon Chain, which signifies the final step in Ethereum’s move from a proof-of-work to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus after the merge in Sep. 2022.
As part of this upgrade, validators will receive rewards payments automatically at periodic intervals in their designated withdrawal addresses. Additionally, stakers have the option to exit their positions entirely and reclaim their full balance.
Meanwhile, the upcoming upgrade has sparked excitement in the crypto community with the Ethereum PoS smart contract attracting roughly 17.7 million ETH valued at about $31.1B, as per Etherscan. That said, whereas some have predicted that the upgrade could trigger a sell-off for ETH in the short term, various analysts believe that it could help push prices higher in the long term.
According to Andrew Thurman, head of content at the blockchain analytics firm Nansen, investors should keep an eye on the net inflow and outflow of the eth staking contract to predict how ethers price will react after Shanghai. “But on a long enough time Horizon, I think no matter what, it’s a bullish outcome,” he said in a Thursday interview with CNBC.
