Ethereum Developers Confirm Shapella Upgrade Will Occur on April 12

Ethereum developers stated in a blog post following the 157th AllCoreDevs Execution Layer meeting that withdrawals of staked ether will be enabled on April 12, 2023.

The upgrade is the final phase that will allow Ethereum validators to unstake ether that they previously locked in a smart contract on Ethereum’s Beacon Chain.

The announcement comes after developers successfully implemented Shapella fork on the Goerli and Sepolia test networks.

The last upgrade, Merge, which combined the Beacon Chain with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), changed Ethereum’s consensus mechanism from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS).

In addition to enabling withdrawals, Shapella implements the following Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs): EIP-3651, EIP-3855, EIP-3860, EIP-4895, and EIP-6049. EIPs are standards that define potential features or new processes for Ethereum.

The new consensus mechanism uses validators instead of miners to confirm transaction blocks and emit them to the Ethereum network.

Initially, validators wishing to secure the network could lock 32 ether in a smart contract on the Beacon Chain to earn rewards.

Some investors wishing to maintain their liquidity could instead stake their assets in a liquid staking protocol. These protocols allow investors to earn ether rewards from validators confirming transactions. Additionally, they receive a liquid version of their staked ether that they can use in various DeFi applications.

Although Shapella represents a significant milestone for the Ethereum blockchain, it still suffers from low transaction throughput. Recent data from Blockchair shows around 10 transactions per second.

While upgrades are being introduced that could significantly increase transaction speeds through a process called danksharding, Ethereum.org reveals that it may take several years before the upgrade is ready.

Accordingly, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin predicted that the path to higher transaction speeds in the short to medium term would occur through rollups.

Rollups allow for greater transaction capacity by reducing traffic on the main Ethereum network by performing most complex operations themselves and then sending a reduced amount of data through the main chain.

Zero-knowledge rollups are gaining popularity

One type of rollup technology is zero-knowledge which generates cryptographic proofs that series of transactions are valid.

The company ConsenSys, which produced MetaMask, announced on March 28, 2023, the launch of a new EVM testnet zero-knowledge network called Linea. Since Linea’s private beta launch, the network has reportedly processed 1.5 million transactions.

According to ConsenSys, developers of decentralized applications on the Ethereum mainnet can create applications with scalable transaction throughput on Linea without rewriting smart contracts.

Linea appears as the default extension for the test network on MetaMask.

The Ethereum sidechain Polygon recently announced a public beta of its zero-knowledge scaling solution. The team at Polygon invited Buterin to perform the first transaction on the network. Buterin sent 0.005 ether to an arbitrary address. Polygon claims that over 50 companies have committed to building decentralized applications on the new rollup.

Last Friday, Matter Labs launched a new zero-knowledge network called zkSync Era in alpha version.