Ethereum Developers Finalize Timeline for Shanghai Mainnet Activation

After a conference call, Ethereum Developers finalized a timeline for the mainnet activation of the Shanghai upgrade. The planned timeline expects Shanghai’s mainnet launch in mid-March 2023 in case testnet releases go without issues.

According to the publication of Galaxy.com, on Thursday, February 2^nd, Ethereum Developers held an All Core Developers Execution (ACDE) call to discuss the timeline for public testnet launches of the Shanghai upgrade, Cancun upgrade that will follow Shanghai and progress on Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 4844.

We wrapped up another @ethereum #ACDE today! Covered the steps to Shapella testnets, lots of 4844 specs discussion, and the path to SSZing the EL.

Agenda: https://t.co/DK8F3qyRfT
Stream: https://t.co/gJE5DKkYfN

Recap below 😄 https://t.co/XA7XJKx8nz

— timbeiko.eth (@TimBeiko) February 2, 2023

The recent call is part of two bi-weekly meeting series. The All Core Developers Execution (ACDE) call focuses on the execution layer of Ethereum, and the other series, ACD Consensus (ACDC) calls, coordinates changes to the consensus layer of Ethereum.

Shanghai Mainnet Activation in Mid-March if All Goes Well

The first public testnet for the Shanghai fork, Zhejiang, went live on Wednesday, February 1^st. According to Tim Beiko from Ethereum Foundation, who chaired the meeting, Zhejiang was reported to have some configuration issues with the consensus layer, and the team is working on it to fix it.

Therefore, Shanghai has yet to be activated on the Zhejiang testnet. Assuming this issue is fixed over the next few days, developers agreed to activate the Shanghai upgrade on Zhejiang next Tuesday, February 7.

If all goes well, developers will decide on the activation date for the release of Shanghai on the Sepolia testnet during the next ACDE call to be held on Thursday. Tim Beiko, in his Twitter thread, wrote:

“As for timing, every EL + CL team on the call agreed that they were pretty much good to go and that, assuming the Zhejiang fork goes smoothly, we could pick a Sepolia fork time on next Thursday’s ACDC call!”

Once the Sepolia release is completed and all goes according to the text, the teams have agreed to release the Shanghai on Ethereum’s Goerli testnet in late February or early March. This will be the last testnet release before the mainnet activation somewhere in mid-March, as Tim Beiko said:

TL;DR: withdrawals are coming 💸! If all goes well, Sepolia time is picked next week, once that goes well, we pick Goerli, and after that transitioned successfully, we move to mainnet 🚢

— timbeiko.eth (@TimBeiko) February 2, 2023

“If all goes well, Sepolia time is picked next week, once that goes well, we pick Goerli, and after that transitioned successfully, we move to mainnet.”

Afterwards, Ethereum developers discussed the progress on Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 4844. This EIP aligns with Ethereum’s scaling roadmap by introducing a new kind of ”transaction type to Ethereum which accepts “blobs” of data to be persisted in the beacon node for a short period of time.”