Ethereum validators will soon be able to withdraw their Ether (ETH) from the Beacon Chain as the Shapella hard fork goes live on the Ethereum mainnet on April 12.
Shapella will take effect at epoch 194.048, scheduled for 22:27 UTC on April 12, Ethereum core developers have confirmed.
Ethereum enhancement proposal EIP-4895 will allow withdrawals by “pushing” staked Ether within 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 Apr. 12, 2023
Client releases compatible with the upgrade are listed in the announcement below https://t.co/I0hSv9lnjz
— timbeiko.eth â˜€ï¸ (@TimBeiko) March 28, 2023
The epoch, slot, and time were confirmed after a week-long deliberation among members of the Ethereum Foundation, led by Tim Beiko, Ethereum’s lead developer.
Although the hard fork will allow for partial and full withdrawals, several mechanisms have been put in place to ensure that a rush of Ether supply does not disrupt the market.
There are now 17.81 million Ether locked up on the Beacon Chain. At a current price of $1,776, this means $31.6 billion can be unlocked over time.
Although the Ethereum Foundation described the latest test 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 be financially incentivized to upgrade to Mainnet.
The main Ethereum hard forks
Due to EIP-4895, Shapella is considered the most important hard fork of Ethereum since Paris (The Merge) changed the consensus mechanism of the network 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. Although validators still receive a block reward and tip, the base fee is burned, thereby making Ether deflationary over time.
Berlin 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 increase the performance of Layer 2 scaling solutions based on SNARKs and STARKs.
If you want to watch as the upgrade happens, you can join @ethStaker, @EthCatHerdersmyself and others during the Shapella watch party here https://t.co/ZHWQfMemZc
— timbeiko.eth â˜€ï¸ (@TimBeiko) March 28, 2023
The Ethereum Foundation also announced last week that it doubled the rewards for any bugs found in Shapella’s code. Rewards can range from $2,000 to $250,000, depending on how “critical” the ruling is.
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