Most prominent smart contract network across the crypto industry, Ethereum network, is soon to witness another major event. The other awaited Shanghai upgrade is scheduled for March 2023. Given the upgrade will enable staking withdrawals, governance tokens of several liquid staking protocols witnessed a rally in the past week or so.
Staking protocols including StakeWise (SWISE), Lido DAO (LDO) and Rocket Pool (RPL) have their token prices rallied. SWISE token gained significant 71% in a week, while LDO token is currently up by over 40% and RPL token is 13% up in the last seven days.
These liquidity protocol native tokens rallied in contrast to broader crypto markets including major cryptocurrency including Bitcoin (BTC) and Etheruem (ETH). Biggest cryptocurrency by the market cap is up by slightly over 1.6% in the last week while the network responsible to make this rally happen gained about 4.8% within the same timeframe.
Ethereum’s upcoming hard fork announced to launch by the last month of this year’s first quarter. The Shanghai hard fork is in line to launch after the now implemented ‘The Merge’ upgrade. The upcoming upgrade will be primarily EIP 4895 code which will enable the withdrawals of stake Ethereum (ETH) over Beacon Chain.
Pseudonym analyst CroissantETH went on to Twitter on 3rd January 2023 and highlighted the event. He noted that liquid staking derivatives had “a nice uptrend.” Citing Shanghai upgrade as the reason behind, he added that it is expectedly be launched in upcoming months and will end up enabling staked ETH withdrawals.
Year 2023 Packed With Upgrades on Ethereum
In December 2022, Ethereum developers set the date of the upcoming hard fork. In addition, they also addressed the ‘EVM Object Format’ (EOF) implementation within the upgrade.
The EOF is primarily a set of Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) acts to upgrade the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). EVM is responsible for smart contracts on the network to execute. EOF implementation will include EIP 3450, EIP 3670, EIP 4200, EIP 4570, EIP 5450.
Furthermore, developers also set the timeline for another hard fork to launch by September 2023. The scaling upgrade called ‘proto-danksharding’, code name EIP 4844, will bring more scalability to Ethereum via sharding. It will create the shards by splitting up the network in order to increase the transaction holding capacity and eventually decrease the gas fees over the network.
Source: https://www.thecoinrepublic.com/2023/01/05/ethereums-upcoming-shanghai-upgrade-already-creating-trembles-staking-protocol-tokens-rallying/