Following a successful transition to Proof-of-Stake (PoS), Ethereum (ETH) developers who set February 28 for the public testnet for the Sepolia Shapella upgrade have now revealed essential details ahead of Shanghai’s Sepolia Shapella main implementation with a focus on stake withdrawals.
According to the development team, node operators, stakers, and validators are expected to update their ETH clients prior to the Shapella upgrade. The new development will afford users the opportunity to withdraw their staked Ether on the Beacon chain and also have access to the currencies already staked on the network- a feature that was not enabled during the network transition to Proof-of-Stake consensus.
To get to the final upgrade which will be without errors, the developers planned different phases of public testing of which Sepolia happens to be the second public testnet to deploy the upgrade. It is expected to be activated on the Sepolia testnet at block height 56832 at 04.04.48 UTC on February 28.
Good time to RT this: Goerli _will_ be shut down eventually, future testnets, incl. Sepolia, can mint more ETH, and hopefully ones after that can include more addresses in genesis files 💸 https://t.co/bGm2xAoG4k
— timbeiko.eth (@TimBeiko) February 26, 2023
Meanwhile, Tim Beiko, an Ethereum developer in a Tweet mentioned that the Goerli testnet which happens to be the final phase will be stopped immediately after the Shanghai main implementation in March. However, the future testnet, not excluding Sepolia will be able to mint more ETH.
Ethereum Users to Access Staked ETH
A few days ago, Ethereum announced its plan to launch a new testnet dubbed “Holli or Holesovice” later in the year. Although the plan to launch the new testnet has been in the process since the Merge upgrade in September last year, the Holli testnet is set to launch in September.
Moreover, early this year, the ETH development team sets March for the main implementation of the Shanghai hard fork which will allow users to have access to their locked Ether.
The public testnet which was also set for this month helped to clear out future problems that may occur once implemented. Since the main focus now is on stake withdrawals, developers have ensured that codes related to Ethereum Virtual Machine- EVM Object format (EOF) are temporarily removed from Shanghai until later.
According to a report by InsideCrypto in January, Ethereum transactions significantly outweighed Bitcoin (BTC) by 338% in 2022 noting that while BTC followed a consistent pattern, ETH on the other hand was more volatile.
