The Ethereum “Shanghai Upgrade (Shapella)” announced during the February Ethereum All Core Developers Consensus (ACDC) conference call that it will be postponed until April.
Shanghai’s upgrade has been finalized and will take place on the evening of April 12th.
According to a tweet from Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko, the Ethereum Foundation’s core development team has confirmed that the Shanghai upgrade will take place at network block height 6209536.Specifically, it is 22:27:35 in the evening on April 12th in UTC time. (Estimated to be 06:27:35 on April 13th in Beijing time, with a possible slight difference in exact time.)
17.7 million Ethereum will be unlocked.
A significant reason why Shanghai’s upgrade is so notable is that it will open up withdrawals for Ethereum staking users, which also means that funds locked up by early Ethereum PoS beacon chain stakers since December 2020 may flow into the market.
According to Dune Analytics, the current amount of ether staked on the beacon chain has exceeded 17.7 million, accounting for 14.75% of the overall ether supply, with a market value of nearly $30 billion.
Meanwhile, according to the information shared by the Ethereum product manager with CoinDesk, it will take about 90 minutes for the block to be finally confirmed after the Shanghai upgrade goes live. However, this will not affect users’ withdrawals, as ETH withdrawals can be processed directly on the test network.
“For 90 minutes, the Ethereum network will be in an uncertain state, but it doesn’t matter much for most applications and users.”
Ben Edgington, the product manager of Ethereum client Teku, has stated that all Ethereum networks have not experienced any unexpected incidents, and everything is proceeding according to plan:Although the participation rate in the (testnet) has decreased, we can see that all clients are generating valid blocks, and the participation rate will increase over time.This reassures us that no fundamental error occurred, only the delay of the upgrade.
Ethereum breaks through $1,700 mark.
Benefiting from this news, as well as a slight easing of the Bank of America crisis, Ethereum soared to $1,691 in the early morning of the 17th, challenging its highest level of $1,700, an increase of 0.8% in the past 24 hours. However, it has since fallen slightly, and is currently trading at $1,668 at the time of writing.
