Ethereum developers announce the release of the Shanghai upgrade in March 2023

The network’s hard fork will allow ETH coins to be withdrawn from staking

09.12.2022 - 12:30

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What’s new? The developers of the Ethereum blockchain plan to activate a hard fork called Shanghai in March 2023. It includes the upgrade EIP-4895, which will allow ETH coins to be withdrawn from staking. According to cryptocurrency tracker Dune, about 15,59 million ETH, or nearly 13% of all tokens, are locked in special wallets. This was revealed by one of Ethereum’s core developers, Tim Beiko, in a recent video conference call.

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An Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) is a proposal to improve the network.

What else was discussed at the conference? Along with Shanghai, a set of previously agreed-upon upgrades will be released, the list of which includes EIP-3651, EIP-3855, and EIP-3860. EIP-3651: Warm Coinbase, in particular, is aimed at reducing costs on the network. This offer has nothing to do with the Coinbase crypto exchange and refers to the name of the software that developers use to get new tokens on the blockchain.

That said, EIP-4884 is not yet included in the upcoming upgrade. The proposal introduces Proto-Danksharding technology to significantly increase the scalability of Layer 2 Rollups (The Surge) before the main Sharding upgrade is fully implemented in late 2023. According to the Ethereum Foundation, Sharding is a multi-phase upgrade designed to significantly increase the “scalability and capacity” of the network, which will open up “more capacity to store and access data.”

In this, the developers have agreed to include a set of EIPs that upgrade the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), including the introduction of a new EVM contract format, code/data separations, and new operation codes. Beiko noted that these upgrades, known as EVM Object Format (EOF), are fairly easy to remove from Shanghai in case they are not ready by the time the upgrade is released.

As of December 9, 12:00 UTC, ETH is trading at $1288, having gained 3,85% per day, according to Binance.

Read more about the withdrawal of ETH from staking in GetBlock Magazine’s article.

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