Ethereum Shapella Upgrade To Soon Go Live; Know What’s Ahead

Another highly anticipated Ethereum Shapella Upgrade will go live around 6:30 ET or 22:30 UTC. Ethereum (ETH) expectations are high, with the upgrade just around the corner.

With Shapella,

Ethereum plans to upgrade the execution layer of the blockchain called Shanghai, the consensus layer called Capella

Hence Shanghai + Capella = Shapella, and Engine API

The upgrade would allow access to nearly 15% of the total ETH.

Ethereum Shapella Upgrade Going Live

Nearly $33.7 Billion worth of ETH has been staked since the last hard fork Merge, and the investors have been waiting for returns and yields ever since. All these can now be un-staked once the Shapella Upgrade goes live, but not everything will be available all at once.

In a week from the upgrade, around 1.1 Million ETH worth approx $2 Billion would be available for grasp.

The rest will be made available from May 2023 in a distributed and sequential manner, thereby reducing the withdrawal pressure on the network. They also incorporate certain security measures to ensure malicious actors cannot exploit the increased traffic and that investors are safe while un-staking their rewards.

According to a recent study, only 29% of staked ETH are profitable concerning USD, meaning that most of the un-staking, if it happens, would be at a loss.

Keeping this in mind, it can be said that there might not be as much withdrawal influx as expected. Moreover, the facility of staking, un-staking, and re-staking could bring added liquidity to the network, plus the added validators would fasten the transaction speed.

Earlier tests for the Ethereum Shapella Upgrade were not encouraging, as the tests revealed longer transaction time, and most of the computers could not adjust to the new upgrade. However, Ethereum developers are working hard toward seamless transfer of the upgrade. The fear of price fluctuation concerning withdrawal influx and selling pressure has also been dealt with and is not supposed to harm that much.

What May Ethereum Bring After Shapella?

The Ethereum ecosystem is working hard on providing the best for the users and investors, its creator Vitalik Buterin released a road map of Ethereum development in November 2022, briefly explaining their road map to becoming the number one blockchain.

After the Upgrade, there will be EIP-4844, involving proto-danksharding and blobs. The sharding concept aims to increase the Ethereum network’s scalability by facilitating more efficient data storage possibilities. The idea was derived from Computer Science and split the blockchain into smaller pieces called shards, creating multiple mini-blockchains.

Danksharding is similar to sharding, with a major difference. Instead of using shards to increase the number of transactions, it increases the space for groups of data known as blobs. This facility allows more data to be processed, thus lowering the transaction cost on layer 2 blockchains.

EIP-4844, proto-danksharding, is supposed to be on the Ethereum mainnet during Q3 2023. For its proper deployment, Ethereum developers have already released KZG Ceremony, a coordinated public ritual providing the foundation for proto-danksharding. KZG Ceremony may allegedly go live in a week.

This EIP-4844 will be known as Verge and introduce Verkle trees for increasing scalability, allowing developers to store large amounts of data; the users could then show a single piece or a short proof for data verification and have a root of that tree. Verkle trees are expected to make data proofs more efficient.

Next in the upgradation cycle would be Purge, which would eliminate historical data from the Ethereum network, thus removing the congestion and allowing increased transaction speeds. Buterin predicted that Ethereum could process around 100,000 transactions per second (TPS) after this phase, which is way higher than the current 29 TPS.

Andrew is a blockchain developer who developed his interest in cryptocurrencies while his post-graduation. He is a keen observer of details and shares his passion for writing along with being a developer. His backend knowledge about blockchain helps him give a unique perspective to his writing