Ethereum Users Excited in Anticipation of Shanghai Hard Fork

The $26 billion (and counting) worth of Ethereum (ETH) pledged on the biggest smart contract network in the world is now one step closer to being accessible to Ethereum users.

The first mainnet shadow fork intended to test the viability of the ETH staking withdrawal capability, a feature planned to activate by March, was successfully deployed, according to an announcement made on Monday by Ethereum’s core developers.

Mainnet shadow forks are complete system upgrade dress rehearsals that let engineers check for design flaws and fix any lingering problems. The test on Monday gave users a sneak peek at Ethereum’s much-awaited Shanghai update, which will bring staked ETH withdrawals to the ecosystem.

The network switched to a proof-of-stake architecture after Ethereum’s historic Merge on September 15, 2022, and Shanghai will be the first significant update since then. The Merge also made it possible for users to deposit ETH with the network in order to sign on-chain transactions and become validators. Such users have consequently been able to earn incentives in the form of freshly created ETH.

Since December 2020, users have staked about $26.5 billion worth of ETH in order to receive these benefits. However, once Shanghai is put into place, those users won’t be able to withdraw either their freshly created ETH or their initial ETH deposits.

The first ETH withdrawal mainnet shadow fork successfully launched on Monday, according to Ethereum core engineer Marius Van Der Wijden, despite a few small glitches that have since been fixed.

All things considered, this indicates that Ethereum will continue to deploy ETH withdrawal functionality over the next five to eight weeks.

Ethereum Developers Working Tirelessly to Meet Deadline

The network’s core developers have made meeting that deadline a major priority. They are anxious to bring about ETH withdrawal functionality as soon as possible—even at the expense of other advancements.

Proto-danksharding, a streamlined data sampling procedure that would make layer-2 transactions on Ethereum significantly cheaper and faster, and EOF, a much-needed and years-delayed update to the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), the mechanism underlying the network that deploys smart contracts, were among the additional, highly anticipated improvements that Shanghai was initially expected to include. However, these changes were delayed to ensure that ETH withdrawals could start in March.