The Ethereum blockchain’s Sepolia testnet has undergone a successful upgrade simulating the upcoming Shanghai hard fork that is expected to take place in March on the network’s mainnet.
The “Shapella” update, which combines the names of the upcoming Shanghai and Capella hard forks, was successfully deployed to the testnet on February 28.
Sepolia testnet has been successfully upgraded to Shapella!
Some of the Prsym validators are offline due to old geth version. They will connect in the next 10 minutes!
Next stop: Goerli pic.twitter.com/pb43Gq7w9C
— terence.eth (@terencechain) February 28, 2023
Shanghai is the name of the fork on the client side of the execution layer, and Capella is the name of the update on the client side of the consensus layer. One of the major changes allows validators to withdraw their staked Ether (stETH) from the Beacon Chain back to the execution layer, among other new functionality.
Related: Lido Finance activates staking rate limit after more than 150,000 ETH staked
Validators needed to stake 32 Ether (ETH) to validate the Ethereum blockchain. They will now be able to withdraw rewards that exceed 32 ETH and will be allowed to continue validating, while those who wish to withdraw completely can take the 32 ETH more rewards and stop validating.
The next step before the Shanghai fork goes live on the mainnet will be to release the upgrade on the Ethereum Goerli testnet, which is expected to start in March.
