The long-awaited Shanghai Upgrade for the Ethereum (ETH) mainnet has been pushed further by two weeks ahead of the initial scheduled date.
Instead of late March as was earlier discussed, the ETH Shanghai Upgrade which will birth the era of additional features on the Ethereum blockchain has been moved to April 2023. This announcement was made at the ETH developers meeting that was held on Thursday, March 2nd.
It is more likely that the Shanghai hard fork will be deployed in the first two weeks of April. The developers came to the agreement that the upgrade should take place two weeks after the Goerli test net launch which is slated for March 14th. Goerli testnet is the final lap through the Shanghai upgrade before the hard fork is finally launched on the mainnet.
Tim Beiko, ETH core developer and project coordinator said ” For mainnet, we usually want to give people at least two weeks after the announcement,” therefore, “imagine Goerli happens on the 14th, everything goes well, on the 16th, we agree to move forward with mainnet, – I think the earliest that puts us is like the first week of April.”
Client teams felt comfortable moving forward with Goerli, which we agreed to fork on March 14, 10:25pm UTC. I've opened a PR to update the specs accordingly: https://t.co/tvcFBCidx5
Expect client releases & an announcement early next week 👀
— timbeiko.eth (@TimBeiko) March 2, 2023
Beiko also clarified that an exact date had not been chosen but this might happen during their next meeting on March 16th, that is if Goerli goes well.
Goerli Phase Will Determine Shanghai Upgrade Launch
Much attention is being given to this Goerli phase seeing that it is the largest public ETH testnet. Also, it is receiving more prominence because it is the final chance for staking providers to ensure that staked ETH can be withdrawn before the Shanghai upgrade. The most recent addition was the Sepolia upgrade which took place a few days ago.
The Sepolia upgrade is the second public testnet to deploy the hard fork. During this time, the ETH developers revealed certain facts ahead of Shanghai’s Sepolia Shapella main implementation which focused on staked withdrawals.
The developer team expects node operators, validators, and stakers to update their ETH clients before the Shanghai upgrade. In addition to withdrawing their staked Ether on the Beacon Chain, users will also be allowed to use a new feature. This newly introduced feature will give users access to the currencies already staked on the network.
