Ethereum Shapella upgrade gets new date, making way for un-staking ETH

Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko announced The Shapella upgrade is scheduled for February 28th. The Shapella network upgrade will be activated on the Sepolia network at epoch 56832.

Shanghai and Capella (Shapella) are upcoming Ethereum hard fork names. Shanghai is the name of the execution layer client-side fork and Capella is the name of the consensus layer client-side upgrade.

Key Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) changes at the execution layer include warm coinbases (not to be confused with crypto exchanges) and beacon chain push withdrawals. Push withdrawal enables the withdrawal of validators from the beacon chain to the Ethereum virtual machine via a new “system-level” operation type. Warmcoinbase, on the other hand, could be a game-changer in reducing network fees for builders.

Coinbase is the name of the software that builders use to receive new tokens on the network. All new platform transactions require multiple round trips to the Coinbase software. The first interaction costs more as the software needs to “warm up”, and the price goes down as the number of interactions increases. However, with the introduction of EIP-3651, the Coinbase software stays warm from the start, with lower gas fees to access.

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Major changes to the consensus layer include full and partial retraction of validators and independent state, replacing the original singular historical roots and blocking historical accumulators.

A partial withdrawal means that a validator can withdraw more than 32 Ether (ETH) rewards and continue validating. If a full withdrawal is desired, the validator can be fully terminated, take all 32 of her Ether and rewards, and stop working.

A future upgrade will allow validators to withdraw staked Ether (stETH) from the beacon chain to the execution layer. Additionally, the upgrade introduces changes to the execution and consensus layers and adds new features, making it a significant post-merge upgrade.

However, stakers and non-stakers operating nodes will need to upgrade their nodes to the latest Ethereum client version to take advantage of Sepolia’s upgrades. After deploying the Sepolia upgrade, the next step is to release the Shanghai upgrade. It will be launched in March on the Ethereum Goerli test network.