By George Ward
According to the Ethereum team, the next upgrade milestone on the blockchain’s roadmap is the Shanghai upgrade. This upgrade will reportedly allow withdrawals for Ethereum stakers from the Beacon Chain.
On December 8th, Ethereum Core Developers held their 151st meeting. At the gathering, core programmers chose a tentative date, March 2023, for ETH’s Shanghai hard fork.
Additionally, developers will work towards launching the EIP (Ethereum Improvement Protocol) 4844 update around May or June 2023. The EIP upgrade will add proto-danksharding to the blockchain.
Three months ago, Ethereum carried out the long-awaited Merge, which ushered in the PoS mechanism. But, staked Ether remains locked on the past Ethereum Beacon Chain.
Lido, a decentralized finance protocol, launched the token with over 3.5 million stETH in circulation. Once the Shanghai upgrade occurs, stETH holders can withdraw their assets.
Also, they can withdraw other staking rewards earned for validating transactions on the network. The Ethereum Foundation said it structured the updates this way.
According to the body, the aim is to simplify and smoothen the transition to the PoS. After the Shanghai upgrade, the EIP-4844 upgrade will add a data-blob-transaction prototype to the network.
Developers invented the prototype on February 21st. Presently, layer-2 networks like Optimistic Rollups can increase the network’s storage off-chain and computation by 100x.
In addition, the upgrade will reduce the transaction fee on layer-2 solutions. However, it will not change Ethereum’s gas fees.
Ethereum Developers To Introduce New EVM Contract Format
Also, Tim Beiko, an Ethereum Core Developer, tweeted that the team should focus on the Shanghai upgrade. He said this would prevent any future delay to the EIP-4844 upgrade.
In a Twitter thread, Beiko said the developers agreed for the Shanghai upgrade to occur around March. Additionally, he stated that a fork-based EIP-4844 upgrade would follow after this Shanghai upgrade.
However, the EIP-4844 will not be in the upgrade. Still, the developers said they would add another group of EIPs that will update the EVM.
They would also introduce a new EVM contract format, new operation codes, and code/data separations. In December 2021, Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, said his final plan is to ensure the Ethereum blockchain is a simple base layer.
The goal is to ensure that users are comfortable saving their assets in a ZK-rollup operating on a full EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine). However, Buterin warned about data availability sampling and sharding.
He argued that they are both complex technologies. Hence, they could take several years of auditing and refining to implement.