key takeaways
- Ethereum underwent the Shanghai upgrade late at night.
- The network has now allowed validators to withdraw their staked ETH.
- There are currently around 17.4 million ETH staked.
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The long-awaited Shanghai update is now live on Ethereum, meaning validators can now withdraw their staked ETH from the network whenever they want.
A historic moment for Ethereum
Ethereum reached another milestone last night.
The Ethereum network experienced its long-awaited Shanghai upgrade on Wednesday the 12th. The hard fork was activated at 22:27 UTC, when the blockchain reached block height 6209536, and ended around 22:42 UTC.
Ethereum from last year in transition from a Proof of Work consensus mechanism to Proof of Stake, an event known in the crypto community as a Merge. In Proof of Work, miners gain the right to produce blocks by solving highly complex equations, which requires huge computational power. Proof-of-stake, on the other hand, allows validators to simply lock 32 ETH into the network to gain the same privileges.
While Ethereum successfully completed the merge on September 15, validators were still unable to withdraw their staked ETH, as the team wanted to ensure the network remained stable post-merge before allowing staking outs. Last night’s update finally allowed validators to stake or unstake their funds. In other words, Ethereum’s transition to proof-of-stake is officially complete.
According unlock tokens, the Ethereum network currently holds 17.4 million ETH (worth about $34.7 billion), which is about 15.4% of the total ETH supply. Approximately 902,860 ETH ($1.8 billion) is currently pending withdrawal. Despite the amount of ETH capable of potentially flooding the market in the short term, ETH itself is up 4.33% on the day and is trading at approximately $2,000, prices not seen since August 2022.
“We are at a stage where the hardest and fastest parts of the Ethereum protocol transition are basically over,” Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin said during a live stream of the event. “Very important things still need to be done, but those very important things can be done safely at a slower pace.”
Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this article owned BTC, ETH, and various other crypto assets.
