According to a Jan. 31 post by Ethereum Foundation developer Parithosh Jayanthi, the “Zhejiang” public withdrawal testnet launching on February 1 at 3:00 pm UTC. Six days after Zhejiang, the Shanghai and Capella testnets will also go live at epoch 1350. Jayanthi noted:
“This is also a great opportunity for all the tools to test how they want to collect, display, and use withdrawal information. You can try to convert the 0x00 credentials to 0x01 and set a withdrawal address. You can test partial withdrawals and full withdrawals by exiting your validator.”
The Shanghai update, when fully implemented, will allow the withdrawal of Ether (ETH) assets and rewards wagered by users. Since the success of the Ethereum Merge update in September 2020, users have been able to stake their ETH on the proof-of-stake network. However, the funds remain locked, pending a new patch.
The Zhejiang public testnet will be launched tomorrow (February 1, 2023 15:00 UTC). Shanghai+Capella will be activated 6 days later (in epoch 1350). You will be able to deposit validators, practice BLS exchange and leave without risk. All the links are here: https://t.co/XNlsDIG0cm pic.twitter.com/sKKDJmolt2
— Barnabas Busa (@BarnabasBusa) January 31, 2023
As told by Ethereum developer Barnabas Busa, Zhejiang will be the first public testnet to launch after the Merge update. Although still in beta, the full retirement source code has been published on the Ethereum website.
Related: Ethereum Developers Target March 2023 for Shanghai Hard Fork
Developers at the Ethereum Foundation have been targeting a tentative date of March 2023 for the highly anticipated Shanghai hard fork. In addition, the upcoming Zhejiang testnet will also feature all of the Ethereum Improvement Protocols (EIPs) included in the Shanghai update, such as the timestamp-based fork.
After Shanghai, the next update on the developer roadmap is EIP-4844, which will be released in May or June of this year. Experts say that EIP-4844 can potentially increase the scalability of Layer 2 stacks on Ethereum by factors of 100x and lower transaction fees.
