A target date has been set for the highly anticipated Shanghai hard fork: April 12. Ethereum Core Developers Approved Target Deadline during Call for Execution Layer #157 for all core developers on March 16.
Initially estimated for the end of March, the Shanghai mainnet upgrade features five Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), including EIP-4985, which will enable withdrawals of Ether (ETH) on the Beacon Chain, completing Ethereum’s transition from proof-of-work (PoW) to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus.
The target date of April 12 22:27:35 UTC epoch 620.9536 will now be confirmed by developers on GitHub. The fork was initially forecast for March, but the developers later pushed it back to early April.
6209536 4/12/2023 22:27:35 UTC
— timbeiko.eth (@TimBeiko) March 16, 2023
Validators will automatically receive reward payments at periodic intervals to withdrawal addresses. In addition, those interested can exit the positions completely, claiming their entire balance.
According For Etherscan, the Ethereum PoS smart contract has attracted more than 17.6 million ETH, worth nearly $29.4 billion at press time. Analysts predict that the upgrade could trigger a short-term sell-off, Cointelegraph reported.
The transition to PoS officially began on September 15, 2022 with The Merge, in a major milestone for the Ethereum network by replacing miners with validators and introducing ETH staking as a key component to the network. The Ethereum roadmap has several updates after Shanghai, known as “Surge”, “Verge”, “Purge”, and “Splurge”.
The move to a PoS consensus could have regulatory implications for ETH and the crypto space. Last September, the chairman of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, suggested that the blockchain transition could have put ETH under the radar of regulators.
After a recent crackdown on cryptocurrency companies providing staking services in the US, Gensler again suggested on March 15 that proof-of-stake coins could be securities:
“Whatever they are promoting and putting in a protocol, and locking their tokens in a protocol, a protocol that is often developed by a small group of entrepreneurs and developers, I would just suggest that each of these token operators (.. .) try to enter into conformity, and the same with intermediaries”.
