Ethereum validators will soon be able to withdraw their Ether (ETH) from the Beacon Chain, and the Shapella hard fork will go live on the Ethereum mainnet on April 12.
Shapella will go live at epoch 194,048, which is scheduled for 10:27pm UTC on April 12, Ethereum Core Developers confirmed.
Withdrawals will be enabled by Ethereum Improvement Proposal EIP-4895 by “pushing” staked Ether from the Beacon Chain to the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), also known as the execution layer.
It’s happening
Shapella is scheduled on mainnet for epoch 194048, scheduled for 22:27:35 UTC on April 12, 2023
The client versions supported by the update are listed in the announcement below https://t.co/I0hSv9lnjz
— timbeiko.eth ☀️ (@TimBeiko) March 28, 2023
The epoch, space, and time were confirmed after a week-long deliberation among members of the Ethereum Foundation, which was led by Ethereum lead developer Tim Beiko.
While the hard fork will allow for partial and full withdrawals, several mechanisms are put in place to ensure that a rush of Ether supply does not disrupt the market.
There are now 17.81 million Ether staked on the Beacon Chain. At a current price of $1,776, that means $31.6 billion can be gradually unlocked over time.
While the Ethereum Foundation described the latest testnet run on Goerli as “smooth”, there was a noticeable delay in activation time due to many validators not updating their client software.
However, Beiko is confident that this time it will not be a problem, as Ethereum validators will have financial incentives to perform the Mainnet upgrade.
Key Ethereum Hard Forks
Due to EIP-4895, Shapella is considered the most significant hard fork on Ethereum since Paris (The Merge) changed the network’s consensus mechanism from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake on September 15.
Before that, London introduced EIP-1559 in August 2021, which introduced a base fee that users must pay instead of the old price auction method. While validators still receive a block reward and tip, the base fee is burned, which is intended to cause Ether to deflate over time.
Related: Ethereum’s Shapella transition is “on the horizon”
Sedan optimized gas costs for some EVM shares in April 2021, while the Beacon Chain Genesis marked the first block to be produced on the proof-of-stake chain on December 1, 2020.
Finally in December 2019, Istanbul served to improve resistance to denial of service attacks and make Layer 2 scaling solutions based on SNARK and STARK more efficient.
If you want to see how the update happens, you can join @ethStaker, @EthCatHerdersme and others during the Shapella watch party here https://t.co/ZHWQfMemZc
— timbeiko.eth ☀️ (@TimBeiko) March 28, 2023
The Ethereum Foundation also Announced last week that doubled the rewards for any bugs found in Shapella’s code. Successful bounties can receive a reward between $2,000 and $250,000, depending on how “critical” the bug is.
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