The possibility of staking withdrawals on Ethereum has been successfully tested on the Zhejiang testnet this Tuesday.
A few days ago, Ethereum developers had announced the launch and activation of Zhejiang, a testnet designed to test validator stake withdrawals.
Zhejiang would be the first testnet to implement Shanghai, one of the most anticipated updates by Ethereum validators to be able to withdraw the ethers deposited in the Beacon Chain since the end of 2020.
Well, the Shanghai update has been successfully implemented in Zhejiang, allowing network developers to test staking withdrawals within a simulated environment. The success of this test, which ended on Tuesday, brings Shanghai's arrival to the Ethereum mainnet even closer and shortens the wait for validators to access their staked funds.
Ethereum developers are making significant progress to release the Shanghai Update within the estimated time. The expected date for the arrival of this important update, which will enable withdrawals for Ethereum participants and validators, on the main network is next March.
Ethereum is getting closer to Shanghai
In recent weeks, Ethereum developers have made major announcements about their progress in developing Shanghai. The update was marked as a priority last year, so much of the team's efforts have been focused on it.
In mid-January, Ethereum launched a devnet or developer testnet to implement the ETH stake withdrawal feature. Likewise, a few weeks ago it was announced launch of Shanghai's first shadow fork as part of the process to test staking ETH withdrawals.
Validator ether withdrawals
Shanghai's successful implementation on the Zhejiang testnet enabled ETH staking withdrawals for the first time, in addition to rewards generated by validators' staking.
Speaking about this feature, Robert Ellison, Chief Growth Officer at Allnodes, said to CoinDesk that the network could receive enormous support now that withdrawals are closer to being a reality. According to Ellison, node validators' uncertainty about when they would be able to access their staked funds was one of the biggest barriers.
Ethereum began its transition path to the Proof of Stake consensus protocol in December 2020 with the launch of its Beacon Chain beacon chain. From that moment, the network's node validators could deposit ethers on the launch platform of what was then called Ethereum 2.0. Staking ETH has remained locked on the network since that time.
At the time of writing this article, there are more than 17,46 million ethers in staking, with an approximate value of $29.270 billion and 513.704 active node validators.
Continue reading: Ethereum launches new devnet to test ETH withdrawals before Shanghai
