Last updated on February 8th, 2024 at 07:14 pm
Ethereum, the foremost smart contract blockchain, has announced the Shanghai/Capella (a.k.a. Shapella) network upgrade. The Shapella upgrade is scheduled for deployment on the Sepolia testnet on February 28th, 2023, at 4:04:48 UTC. This announcement was posted yesterday, February 21st, 2023, via Ethereum developer Tim Bieko’s Twitter handle.
According to Ethereum’s blog post, the Shapella network upgrades would result in changes to Shanghai; the execution layer; Capella, the consensus layer; and the Engine Application Programming Interface (API). Hence the moniker “Shapella”, coined from Shanghai and Capella.
This network upgrade would allow validators on the Ethereum network to withdraw their staked Ethereum tokens from the Beacon Chain (Ethereum’s Proof-of-Stake blockchain that stores and manages the registry of validators and coordinates the shard chains) back to the execution layer. 32 ETH is the minimum requirement to become a validator on the Ethereum network. In return for staking ETH to secure the network, validators earn rewards in ETH.
The upgrade is expected to result in better functionality in the execution and consensus layers. Thus, stakers and non-staking node operators are advised to upgrade the node version to the required Ethereum client. Users who use an Ethereum client that has not been updated to the latest version will have their client sync to the pre-fork blockchain once the upgrade occurs, leaving them stuck on an incompatible chain that follows the old rules and unable to send Ether or operate on the post-Shapella Sepolia network.
Tim Beiko tweeted last week that other Ethereum core developers had discovered a Shapella bug that could affect the Sepolia upgrade.
However, an additional Hive test was conducted, and it was determined that it would not affect the upgrade’s scheduled time.
Ethereum staking started in December 2020, a few weeks after the launch of the Beacon Chain. Thus, the withdrawal of staked ETH is very much anticipated news for validators as they have locked up their tokens for nearly three years.
Lark Davis, a crypto influencer, shared a video on his YouTube channel saying Ethereum might have a significant fall in price as over 16 million ETH staked would be released. He also mentioned it would pass as a good opportunity to buy Ethereum.
Video on Ethereum price movement by Lark Davis
With a market capitalization of $200 billion, Ethereum remains the most popular altcoin and the second largest cryptocurrency, according to CoinMarketCap.
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