On April 12, 2023, the Shapella update will take place on the Ethereum blockchain, which will be at epoch 194,048. This update is great news for validators on Ethereum, as it will finally allow the withdrawal of their ETH via Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 4895.
Once implemented, this will transfer the Ether staked from the Beacon Chain to the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), also known as the execution layer.
According to recent crypto news, Ethereum lead developer Tim Beiko announced the news on Twitter. This update was confirmed after extensive deliberation and discussion among members of the Ethereum Foundation, led by Beiko.
The Shapella update will finally allow the partial or complete withdrawal of ETH. It should be noted that several mechanisms have been put in place to avoid a disruption of market dynamics with the sudden influx of unlocked ETH. Currently, approximately 17.81 million ETH is staked on the Beacon Chain, representing approximately $31.6 billion in ETH released over time.
This announcement comes after the successful deployment of Shapella on the Goerli and Sepolia testnets, although some validators did not update their client software in time, which caused a delay in the activation of Shapella. However, Beiko said that won’t be a problem this time around.
The Shapella update involves changes to the Shanghai Ethereum virtual machine and the Capella consensus layer, as well as a change to the engine API connecting the two layers. Apart from withdrawals, the Shapella update also implements several other Ethereum improvement proposals, such as EIP-3855, EIP-3651, EIP-3860, EIP-4895, and ‘EIP-6049.
Before the Shapella update, validators had to block 32 ETH in a smart contract on the Beacon Chain in order to receive rewards. Ethereum has seen many other updates, the most recent being Shapella, considered one of the biggest since the Paris update. The latter also marked the platform’s transition to the Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism.
However, despite this update, Ethereum still suffers from low transaction processing capacity. Data from Blockchair shows that the current processing speed of Ethereum is 10 transactions per second.
Finally, the Ethereum Foundation announced that it will double the rewards for any bugs found in Shapella’s source code. Rewards can vary from $2,000 to $250,000, depending on the “criticality” of the bug.
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