Here is the expected date for Ethereum’s Shanghai Hard Fork

After a months-long wait since the Merger, Ethereum developers have set a target date for the highly anticipated Shanghai fork of the network.

The upgrade will allow network participants to withdraw their locked Ether (ETH) for the first time since December 2020.

Withdraw staked ETH

During a recorded call among top developers on Thursday, the developers set April 12 as their target date for “Shapella,” the dual upgrade that enables ETH withdrawals. Shapella is a combination of the words Shanghai and Capella, Ethereum consensus and execution layer changes, respectively.

Once the developers vote and commit the update via GitHub, April 12 will be set in stone: a month late from its initial target date of March 2023. To be precise, popular developer Tim Beiko tweeted on Thursday that the fork would occur at block 6209536, which will arrive at 22:27:35 UTC on April 12.

This follows several successful sim updates on Ethereum testnets, including its Goerli testnet on Tuesday. Things ran smoothly, apart from some issues related to validators being delayed in the update, issues that Beiko reclaimed it is not likely to be repeated on the main network.

Again, this is something that could be worse on Goerli than on the mainnet, as those nodes are more likely to run on fewer resources than those on the mainnet.

— timbeiko.eth (@TimBeiko) March 14, 2023

The move from Ethereum to proof of participation in September allowed ETH owners to start earning returns on their holdings, effectively producer 4% yield at the time of writing.

It also rendered the network mining industry completely obsolete, incentivizing relevant companies to transfer your GPU processing power to other proof-of-work chains. This has substantially reduced the energy footprint of Ethereum, which its neighboring Bitcoin network is typically scrutinized for.

There are currently 17.6 million ETH locked within the network. participation contract. That’s about 14.3% of the total supply, creating a $29.4 billion economic security wall against a possible 51% attack.

While staking requires a minimum of 32 ETH for individuals, small retail owners can split amounts of ETH through centralized staking services. Coinbase, which offers such a service, foretold on Wednesday that its platform will experience high unstake demand after the update next month.

Has the merger failed?

While the merger helped Ethereum escape the critical gaze of environmentally conscious politicians, it may have given market regulators more reason to clamp down on the cryptocurrency heavyweight.

Last week, New York Attorney General Letitia James defendant KuCoin for allegedly listing securities on its platform, one of which, it claimed, is ETH.

echoing previous claims of Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Gary Gensler, James argued that the transition to proof-of-stake gave ETH more security-like properties.

“The switch to proof-of-stake significantly affected core functionality and incentives to own ETH, because ETH holders can now benefit simply by participating in staking,” he stated in a legal filing.