Ethereum (ETH) developers have announced the release date for the Zhejiang testnet, where staking withdrawals will begin. Zhejiang will be the first Ethereum public testnet since the Merge upgrade in 2022.
Date for Ethereum staking withdrawals has been announced
Ethereum developers have announced that Zhejiang, Ethereum’s first public withdrawal testnet, will be released on February 1 at 6:00 pm. The Shanghai upgrade will come into effect in the period of 1,350, six days later. After the upgrade, users will be able to test partial and full withdrawals as well as several other EIPs included in the upgrade. Ethereum developer Parithosh Jayanthi adds the following notes to the announcement:
This is also a great opportunity for all tools to test how they want to collect, view and use their withdrawal information. You can try converting the 0x00 credentials to 0x01 and specify a withdrawal address. You can test partial and full withdrawals by logging out of your validator.
The Zhejiang public testnet is going live tomorrow (1st of Feb 15:00 UTC, 2023). Shanghai+Capella will be triggered 6 days later (at epoch 1350). You will be able to deposit validators, practice BLS change and exit without risk. All links are here: https://t.co/XNlsDIG0cm pic.twitter.com/sKKDJmolt2
— Barnabas Busa (@BarnabasBusa) January 31, 2023
PoS Ethereum launches first withdrawals
The Shanghai upgrade, which is expected to be released six days after the Zhejiang testnet, when fully implemented, will allow users to withdraw their staked Ethereum and rewards. Since the success of the Ethereum Merge upgrade in September 202, users have been able to stake their ETH on the PoS network. However, the funds were locked until awaiting a new patch. February 1 at 18:00 will be the date for the first withdrawal attempts on the Zhejiang testnet.
As another Ethereum developer, Barnabas Busa, said, Zhejiang is the first public testnet launched after the Merge upgrade. Although still in beta, the entire withdrawal source code has been published on the Ethereum website.
The wait begins for Shanghai hard fork
Ether developers are targeting March 2023 as a tentative date for the highly anticipated Shanghai hard fork. Additionally, the upcoming Zhejiang testnet will include all Ethereum Improvement Protocols (EIPs) included in the Shanghai upgrade, such as timestamp-based forks.
After Shanghai, the next upgrade on the developers’ roadmap is the EIP-4844, which will be released in May or June of this year. Experts say that EIP-4844 could potentially increase the scalability of layer-2 aggregations on Ethereum with transaction fees of 100x and lower.
The amount of ETH staked on Lido Finance moves to a new milestone
According to on-chain analytics platform IntoTheBlock, the amount of ETH staked on Ethereum’s largest liquid staking protocol Lido Finance has just reached $5 million. After Merge, the popularity of liquid staking protocols such as Lido Finance has increased.
The amount of $ETH staked with @LidoFinance just reached 5 million!$stETH #lido #ETH #Staking pic.twitter.com/i9ewWkDlEB
— IntoTheBlock (@intotheblock) January 31, 2023
cryptocoin.com We have included detailed information about merge in this article. With the latest developments, staking, which especially institutional investors showed interest, started to be implemented successfully.
