The Merge will soon have a successor – Last September, the network Ethereum completed its long-awaited transition from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake. Now this one prepares for the Shanghai hard fork, which will open the possibility of withdrawing ETH in staking. In this context, shapella is no more thana few weeks away to be deployed on Ethereum.
Shapella on Ethereum’s Sepolia testnet: deployment date finally revealed
After several months of tests, various devnets and other shadow forks, the hard fork shanghai will be deployed on the Ethereum testnets.
The Shanghai hard fork is also called the update shapella. In practice, it is a contraction of Shanghai And Capella. These are the two updates included in the hard fork, one impacting the execution layer and the other the consensus one.
On February 21, the Ethereum Foundation revealed the rollout date for Shapella on the Sepolia testnet. This will take place THE February 28more precisely at epoch 56832, around 5 am (French time).
“After months of testing and a fleeting launch on devnet, the Shanghai/Capella (aka Shapella) network upgrade is now slated for deployment on Sepolia. This upgrade follows The Merge. It allows validators to withdraw their ETH staking on the Beacon chain to bring it back to the execution layer. »
Statement from the Ethereum team
Subsequently, this update will be deployed on the ethereum mainnet in March. Nevertheless, no date has not yet been announced. It is likely that the developers are waiting for the result of its deployment on Sepolia.
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Shanghai and Capella: rich updates
As we have just seen, Shapella is a contraction of the two updates that will open the withdrawal of ETH deposited in staking.
Shanghai
On one side we have the update Shanghai. This is specific to the execution layer and includes five EIPs :
- EIP-3651: Warm COINBASE;
- The EIP-3855: PUSH0 statement;
- EIP-3860: Limit and meter initcode;
- EIP-4895: Beacon chain push withdrawals as operations;
- EIP-6049: Deprecate SELFDESTRUCT.
Note that theEIP-6049 is only one deprecation warning. Client teams expect the semantics of SELFDESTRUCT to change in future network updates. However, the behavior of the opcode will remain unchanged following Shanghai.
Capella
On the other side we have the update Capella. This is specific to the consensus layer, also called a beacon chain. This involves three evolutions :
- Full and partial withdrawals for validators;
- BLSToExecutionChange messages, which allow validators using a BLS_WITHDRAWAL_PREFIX to update it to an ETH1_ADDRESS_WITHDRAWAL_PREFIX, a precondition for withdrawals;
- Independent historical accumulators per state and per block, replacing the original singular historical roots.
As a simple user, no procedure is to be carried out. For their part, validators with a node on the Sepolia testnet are invited to update their clients.
For their part, validators on the Ethereum network can take comfort in the face of slashing penalties. Indeed, it would seem that this has only affected 0.04% of validators since 2020.
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