Ethereum’s Next Big Upgrade “Shapella” Coming This April

In a tweet published on Tuesday, noted Ethereum engineer Tim Beiko revealed the launch date for the next phase of Shanghai hard fork, also referred to as “Shapella”. The upgrade is scheduled on the mainnet for epoch 194048 at 22:27:35 UTC on Apr. 12, 2023. The crucial part of the update is the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 4895, which is designed to enable validators to withdraw their staked tokens from the main network.

Shapella Upgrade Coming In April

The upgrade which is a clever combination of Shanghai (execution layer) and Capella (consensus layer), is one of the most crucial upgrades that Ethereum has received since “The Merge” in September of 2022. In fact, The Merge replaced the proof-of-work consensus mechanism used by ETH’s blockchain with the proof-of-stake model, changing the role of miners to that of stakers and paving the way for a more energy-efficient future for the second-largest blockchain in the cryptocurrency space.

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The successful launch of the upgrade will unlock more than 17 million ETH, which is equivalent to approximately 15% of the total supply. In addition to the withdrawals, the developers of the Shapella upgrade have planned a total of three further modifications that are intended to optimize the gas fees associated with particular activities.

ETH Price Action

Following the transition to proof-of-stake, the number of validators on the Ethereum network has considerably expanded to over 500,000, and the ETH’s token supply has been in a deflationary state at least twice. These validators certify proof-of-stake blocks and transactions while also contributing to the network’s overall security in a manner analogous to that of miners.

The Ethereum community and the larger crypto market have positively received the new development, and market participants believe that this could eventually result in a bullish scenario for Ethereum’s native token, ETH. As things currently stand, the price of Ethereum (ETH) is exchanging hands at $1,736, which represents an increase of 1.40% over the previous 24 hours in contrast to a decline of 3.15% over the last seven days.

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Pratik has been a crypto evangelist since 2016 & been through almost all that crypto has to offer. Be it the ICO boom, bear markets of 2018, Bitcoin halving to till now – he has seen it all.

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