Ethereum Shapella Upgrade on Mainnet: What to Expect Ahead?

Ethereum Shapella Upgrade is now live on the mainnet allowing validators to un-stake ETH for withdrawals from Beacon Chain. The upgrade went live at epoch 194,048 on April 12 at 10:27 P.M. UTC, opening around $3.37 billion worth of ETH for grasp, nearly 15% of the total ETH supply. 

After Effects of Ethereum Shapella Upgrade

• Since the hard fork registration, withdrawals saw the unlocking of about 116,334.75 Ether in 44,621 withdrawals.
• The validator count was 285,423, of the 546,169 active requests for partial or full withdrawals. 
• Interestingly, most withdrawals were between 2.8 to 3.2 ETH. 
• Huobi holds the most significant share, around 30%, of the total withdrawable Ether, and the decentralized autonomous organization PieDAO follows next with 17.7%. 

When writing ETH was trading at $1.979.83 after rising 5.74%, its value against Bitcoin jumped by 5.05% to 0.06552BTC, market cap gained 5.70% to $238 Billion, and trading volume hiked by 58.47% to $13.4 Billion. 

Still ranked number 2, Ethereum enjoys a market dominance of 19.18%. This movement has been a recent one, as following the upgrade there was no considerable movement. 

Reports suggested that about 1% of the total staked ETH would be released in the first week, out of which 0.07% were unlocked in the Beacon Chain in the first hour after launch. Staked ETH was flown from the Beacon Chain to the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) via Ethereum Investment Proposal EIP – 4895. 

This transfer made the withdrawals possible.

What’s Next After Ethereum Shapella Upgrade?

This upgrade will not be the last one from Ethereum, as the Founder, Vitalik Buterin, released the road map for the network’s future in November 2022. Next would be EIP-4844, which would involve proto-danksharding and blobs. 

Sharding is a concept in which a blockchain is divided into multiple smaller blockchains called a shard. Danksharding is very similar to it with the difference that instead of dividing the blockchain, it would increase the space for data or blobs. This would facilitate lower transaction costs on layer 2 compatible chains. 

EIP-4844 is expected to arrive sometime in the third quarter of 2023, ground work for this is already in place with KZG Ceremony providing a foundation for proto-danksharding. 

This upgrade will be followed by Verge, introducing Verkle trees, thereby increasing the scalability of the network. This would allow the developers to store a large amount of data, while the users would only require a single proof or short proof for verification to have a root of that tree. Verkle trees would facilitate efficient data proofs, by using this concept of cryptography. 

The Verge upgrade would be followed by Purge, in which the historical data would be removed from the Ethereum network. This removal would remove the congestion, thereby allowing faster processing of transactions. Buterin suggested that after the Purge, the Ethreum network would be able to process nearly 100,000 Transactions Per Second (TPS), the current speed of the network is around 29 TPS. 

Steve Anderson is an Australian crypto enthusiast. He is a specialist in management and trading for over 5 years. Steve has worked as a crypto trader, he loves learning about decentralisation, understanding the true potential of the blockchain.

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