- The long-awaited Ethereum Shanghai Upgrade date has finally been announced.
- Core developers from Ethereum have finally revealed the date to be April 12, 2023.
- The crypto world is more eager than ever to welcome a PoS Ethereum ecosystem.
The long awaited Ethereum Shanghai upgrade is almost here. Ethereum’s core developers have announced that the Shanghai hard fork will take place on April 12, completing Ethereum’s transition from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake consensus.
This upgrade will enable staked Ether withdrawals on the Beacon Chain. This will be a huge step to bring Ethereum 2.0 into fruition. More importantly, ETH stakers who staked a huge amount of ETH to become validators can finally unstake their assets.
The Ethereum $ 2,944.38 3.43% and Bitcoin $ 87,903.00 1.10% networks always received criticism for their Proof-of-Work consensus methods. Now, with this move, Ethereum will finally shift into Proof-of-Stake. Thus, it will produce a much smaller carbon footprint.
The hard fork includes five Ethereum Improvement Proposals, with EIP-4985 being the key change. Validators will receive rewards payments automatically, and stakers can exit positions entirely, reclaiming their full balance.
According to Etherscan, the Ethereum network’s Proof-of-Stake smart contract has already attracted more than 17.6 million ETH. To highlight, this 17.6 million ETH holds the value of around $29.4 billion.
The transition to Proof-of-Stake started on September 15, 2022, with the Merge, and analysts predict that the upgrade could trigger a sell-off in the short term. Ethereum’s roadmap has several updates coming after Shanghai, including the ‘Surge’, ‘Verge’, ‘Purge’, and ‘Splurge’.
United States Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler has suggested that the blockchain’s transition might have brought ETH under the regulators’ radar, and Proof-of-Stake coins might be securities. We will have to see how the US regulators will proceed from here.
