Ethereum devs confirm epoch & date for Shapella upgrade

  Ethereum News   Mar 29, 2023   455

Following the upgrade, Validators will soon be able to withdraw their staked ETH from the Beacon chain.

Ethereum devs confirm epoch & date for Shapella upgrade

Ethereum’s Shapella hard fork is set to be activated on the mainnet at epoch 194,048, which is scheduled for 10:27:35 PM UTC on April 12, as per the announcement from Ethereum developers.

ETH withdrawals will be enabled by Ethereum Improvement Proposal EIP-4895 by “pushing” staked Ether from the Beacon Chain to the execution layer or EVM.

The epoch and time were confirmed after a week-long deliberation between members of the Ethereum Foundation. The announcement came forward by Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko.

 

As the Shapella fork will allow for withdrawals, the Ethereum community has set several mechanisms in order to ensure a flood of Ether doesn’t disrupt the market. Currently, there are approximately 17.81 million ETH staked on the Beacon Chain. This means $31.6 billion, according to current market price, can be incrementally unlocked after completing the upgrade.

Ethereum Foundation described the testnet Shapella upgrade on Goerli as “smooth.” However, there was a notable delay in activation time due to many validators not updating their client software. Tim Beiko is, however, confident that it won’t be an issue this time as validators will be economically incentivized to update for Ethereum mainnet.

The Ethereum Foundation also doubled rewards for any bugs found in the Shapella code, to prevent any tragedy at large scale. Successful bounties shall receive a reward anywhere between $2,000 and $250,000 depending on how critical the bug is or how it affects the network.



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