After the successful final testnet Goerli on March 14, Ethereum developer Tim Beiko confirmed on March 16 that the official launch of the Shanghai upgrade will be on April 12, 2023.
The Ethereum team previously also decided to choose March as the time to launch the Shanghai hard fork. But the network needs to go through the full range of Sepolia, Zhejiang, and Goerli testnets. Each testnet was spaced 3 weeks apart. Therefore, Shanghai had to delay until April.
The Shanghai hard fork is considered the most important milestone that will bring many changes to the ETH network. Shanghai, also known as “Shapella”, is the next upgrade in the predetermined roadmap after The Merge. One of the important proposals on the Shanghai Hard Fork is EIP-4895 to help unlock the huge amount of ETH staking for ETH 2.0 belonging to the Merge.
After this Blockchain switched from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, transactions will be validated by users who staked ETH to accumulate rewards. Since the opening of the ETH 2.0 staking contract in December 2020, the amount locked has now reached more than 17.5 million ETH. These coins account for about 14.5% of the total ETH in circulation.
