According to Christine Kim, a research associate at Galaxy, the release date of the public testnet for the Ethereum Shanghai update has been hinted to occur around the end of February.
During the most recent All Core Developers (ACD) call of 2023, Kim said that in order to guarantee that developers would be able to meet the March target, they plan to make the Shanghai upgrade available on a public test network by the end of February.
The Ethereum development team made the announcement a month ago that they were targeting March 2023 for the release of staked ETH. The Ethereum Beacon Chain has been updated to include a lock for Staked Ether (stETH). After the Shanghai update, users will only be able to withdraw cash and any relevant staking rewards for verifying network transactions. Until then, users will not be able to withdraw funds.
Because the core developers were concerned that adding Ethereum Virtual Machine Object Format (EOF), which was a planned update to the blockchain’s EVM programming environment, might cause Shanghai to be delayed, they chose not to add it during the conference.
Vitalik Buterin, one of Ethereum’s co-founders, was quoted as saying, “In the EVM, it’s far harder to delete things than it is to remove other features.” You have apps that are written in EVM code, and if the EVM changes, then those applications will be unable to update along with it.
In response, the software developer lightclient admitted that the addition of EVMs in Shanghai would result in an upgrade delay of about one month depending on the outcomes of EOF testing conducted during the holiday break.
During the conference, Lightclient made the observation, “I don’t believe we’ll be ready by the beginning of February if we’re trying to conduct mainnet testnet upgrades.”
Barnabus Busa, who works as a DevOps Engineer for the Ethereum Foundation, has given an update on the testing being done on staked ETH withdrawals. He claims that the Shanghai developer test network, which was only just made available before Christmas, has already progressed to the block 4,000 level.
Compiled by Coinbold