The Shapella upgrade is scheduled to go live on the Ethereum mainnet next Wednesday, April 12th.
Ether staking withdrawals are closer than ever.
Through a blog post, Ethereum Foundation developers have confirmed that Shapella, which includes the Shanghai and Capella upgrades, will be activated on the mainnet at epoch 194048, scheduled for April 12 of this year.
Shapella will implement Ethereum Improvement Proposal EIP-4895, enabling withdrawals of staked ETH on the Beacon Chain.
Ethereum validators started depositing their ethers on the beacon chain since December 2020. At the time of writing this article, there are more than 17,8 million ETH in staking, valued at around $31.730 million.
Shapella, from Goerli to Ethereum Mainnet
After successfully deploy the Shapella update to their testnets Ethereum developers Sepolia and Goerli are ready to bring the upgrade to the mainnet. During the 157th developers meeting, the team agreed on April 12 as the date chosen by consensus for its activation.
Shapella follows The Merge hard fork, which changed the Ethereum network’s consensus protocol from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake. The new upgrade will allow validators to withdraw their staked ether, while also introducing new improvements and functionalities to the blockchain.
A call to test network security
On Twitter, Ethereum lead developer Tim Beiko shared several updates about Shapella. Beiko called on validators to educate themselves about the ether withdrawal process and supported client versions like Shapella.
The blockchain developer also invited the crypto community to test the code for any existing vulnerabilities or bugs.
To encourage professional hackers to test Shapella's security, the Ethereum Foundation has doubled all rewards in its Ethereum Bug Bounty program until April 5. Hackers can receive a bonus of up to $500.000, the Foundation says on its website.
What is the Shapella update?
Shapella is the name given to the combination of the Shanghai and Capella upgrades that will be activated on the Ethereum mainnet via a hard fork next month.
As the Ethereum Foundation explains, the main feature of this new update is the enabling of withdrawals of validators' stake ether, which remains locked in the Ethereum Beacon Chain.
Shanghai is the name of the hard fork on the execution client side, while Capella is the name of the upgrade on the client side of the consensus layer, explained the Foundation.
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