The official upgrade, which will allow Ethereum users to withdraw staked ETH, is on track for March delivery.
Ethereum is one step closer to the new update
Ethereum users are one step closer to accessing $26 billion worth of (and growing) ETH staked with the world’s largest smart contract network.
Ethereum’s core developers on Monday announced the successful deployment of the first mainnet shadow fork, designed to test the readiness of ETH staking withdrawal capability, a feature expected to be released by March.
Mainnet shadow forks are full rehearsals of system upgrades, allowing developers to test for design flaws and fix prominent issues. Monday’s test previewed Ethereum’s upcoming and highly anticipated Shanghai upgrade.
Shanghai will be the first major update since Ethereum’s historic merger in September that transformed the network into a proof-of-stake system. The merge also introduced the ability to deposit ETH with the network for users to become validators and help verify on-chain transactions. In turn, such users were able to accumulate rewards in the form of newly created ETH.
Announced the start of Shadow Fork
Users have staked around $26.5 billion worth of ETH since December 2020 to earn such rewards. However, these users will be able to withdraw both their newly minted ETH and their original ETH deposits only when Shanghai goes live. cryptocoin.comAs we mentioned, ETH is instantly traded at $ 1.635.
Ethereum core developer Marius Van Der Wijden announced on Twitter on Monday that the first ETH withdrawal mainnet shadow fork has been successfully launched despite a few minor issues that have since been fixed.
By all accounts, this means that Ethereum continues to offer ETH withdrawal features in the next five to eight weeks. This timeline has been a top priority for core developers of the network, who are willing to roll out ETH withdrawal capability as soon as possible, even at the expense of other improvements.
Additional improvements expected
Shanghai was originally expected to include much anticipated additional enhancements including proto-danksharding, a streamlined data sampling process on Ethereum that will make Layer-2 transactions significantly cheaper and faster.
Among these additional updates is EOF, a much-needed and delayed update for the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), the underlying mechanism of the network that deploys smart contracts. However, both updates have been delayed so that ETH withdrawals can begin until March.
Last week, some core developers of Ethereum expressed their disappointment at the decision to abandon an update to the coding method used to launch Shanghai. This decision, another sacrifice made by developers to speed up the release of the upgrade, could have unforeseen technical repercussions for Ethereum in the coming years, multiple core developers said.
The launch of the upgrade will undoubtedly have a significant impact on the crypto markets. Analysts at JP Morgan recently wrote that the ability for ETH stakers to withdraw as they please could ‘start a new era of staking’ for major crypto exchange Coinbase, whose value has bled since the start of the most recent crypto winter last May.
