In a blog post published on Tuesday, March 28th, Ethereum’s core devs officially confirmed that the long-awaited ‘Shapella” upgrade will go live on the mainnet on April 12th. “Shapella” is a combination of two upgrades—Shanghai and Capella—and comes after Goerly and the “Merge”.
“Shapella” Will Go Live on the Mainnet on April 12th
This Tuesday, Ethereum’s core developers confirmed in a blog post that the “Shapella” upgrade will go live on April 12th at 10:27 PM UTC—6:27 PM EST. According to the blog post, the upgrade will occur at network epoch 194,048. Today’s announcement confirms the previous speculation on “Shapella’s” date.
The upgrade, consisting of the consensus layer’s Shanghai, and the execution layer’s Capella, will enable users to finally unstake their Ethereum. “Shapella’s” two components will be executed simultaneously and come after successful Goerli and “Merge” upgrades. The devs also offered the list of clients compatible with the update.
Additionally, according to the blog post, non-staking node operators will have to update their clients for the upgrade, and stakers will need to update both the beacon node and validator client. Other users will not have to undertake any additional actions unless instructed by their wallet providers.
Major Platforms’ Preparations for “Shapella”
With Ethereum’s news upgrade about to go live, there is little surprise in the fact that multiple major companies have started offering guidance to their users on how the update will be handled. On March 16th, for example, Coinbase announced that Ethereum unstaking will be available 24 hours after “Shapella”.
At the same time, the exchange also noted that there is no need for anyone to unstake their ETH and added that all assets will be secured during the upgrade. Kraken’s US-based users, on the other hand, will have no choice but to unstake their Ethereum due to a recent settlement between the company and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
“Shapella” is also expected to significantly boost the percentage of staked Ethereum. According to a report from February, only about 14% of ETH’s supply was staked compared to the ratio of about 70% seen on blockchains like Solana and Cardano. It is generally believed that the reason for the relatively low numbers is that Ethereum staking currently carries some liquidity risk as unstaking is not possible—and “Shapella” will remove that risk.
This article originally appeared on The Tokenist
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