Ethereum developers have decided to prioritize enabling staking withdrawals in the Shanghai upgrade before implementing the Ethereum Improvement Proposal EIP 4884 related to The Surge.
In this way, the next steps that will take place with the Shanghai update will allow withdrawals for participants and validators of the ETH Beacon Chain. While EIP-4884 was originally expected to be included with the Shanghai upgrade, thereby introducing proto-danksharding for The Surge’s cumulative Layer 2 scalability improvement ahead of the full Sharding upgrade planned for late 2023, it has been left out for now.
According to Tim Beiko, lead developer of Ethereum, The final consensus reached at the latest developer meeting on December 8th was to focus on Shanghai first to prevent delays if EIP-4844 is not ready on schedule. Beiko noted on Twitter that they have agreed to “get Shanghai done quickly around March and then follow up with a fork focused on EIP-4844.” So while EIP 4844 will not be included initially, the developers have agreed to include a set of EIPs that will allow for an upgrade of the Ethereum virtual machine, including the introduction of a novel EVM contract format, new opcodes, and code/data separations.
Furthermore, Ethereum also explained that the proposed EVM Object Format updates are easy to withdraw and remove from Shanghai if developers have not finished working on them by the time Shanghai is ready for implementation. A set of EIPs previously agreed upon with Shanghai are also planned to be implemented: the list includes EIP 3651, EIP 3855, EIP 3860, and EIP 4895.
Specifically, EIP-3651 introduces some cost-reduction benefits to the network, as it will allow for lower gas fees by optimizing network operation. The Ethereum Foundation has further explained that Sharding is a multi-phase upgrade specifically designed to significantly increase the scalability and capacity of the Ethereum network by implementing shard chains, which will give the network more capacity to store and access data.
With these enhanced data storage capabilities, Layer 2 solutions will be able to offer lower transaction fees. When the entire process is complete, the final part of this roadmap is the Sharding upgrade that will be implemented between 2023 and 2024.
