In the latest All Core Developers Execution (ACDE) meeting, Ethereum core developers have pushed the Shanghai upgrade’s mainnet launch to April. The date was set for mid-March in the previous All Core Dev call.
The meeting was held on Thursday, March 2nd, where Ethereum core developers discussed the next steps to move forward with the Shanghai upgrade and touched on other upcoming upgrades, like Cancun, to the Ethereum network.
Shanghai Mainnet Awaits Successful Goerli Testnet
Recall that in the previous ACDE meeting, Ethereum core developers finalized a timeline for the Shanghai upgrade’s launch on the Ethereum mainnet. That timeline expected the mainnet launch in mid-March.
However, in Thursday’s meeting, developers agreed to delay the launch to April 2023. According to Ethereum core developers and team leader Tim Beiko, they first discussed the Shapella upgrade on Ethereum’s Sepolia testnet that happened on Tuesday, February 28th.
Shapella is a portmanteau that combines two upgrades: Shanghai to Ethereum’s execution layer and Capella to the consensus layer. These testnet upgrades test the network validators to unstake the staked ETH. With the current mechanism, the validators who stake 32 ETH on-chain cannot withdraw their funds but will be able to do so when the upgrade goes live on the mainnet.
According to developers, Shapella’s launch on Sepolia went without a hitch. But the team wants a final rehearsal on the Goerli testnet, which has been slated for March 14, before a mainnet activation. Tim Beiko wrote:
“Client teams felt comfortable moving forward with Goerli, which we agreed to fork on March 14, 10:25 pm UTC.”
Tim Beiko noted that they had not decided on an explicit date for the mainnet launch. If all goes well for Goerli, the team will decide on the exact date in the next ACDE meeting on March 16. His tweet reads:
“Teams were suggesting roughly 4 weeks after that for a potential mainnet fork, giving them 1 week to put out + test a release, and then 2+ weeks of heads up for people to upgrade their nodes.”
At its core, Shanghai is the implementation of Ethereum Improvement Proposal-4895 which addresses staked Ether (ETH) withdrawals. However, the full roster of features that Shanghai will add to the network includes a reduction in gas fees for both users and developers and other improvements in user experience.
The core developers also discussed the Cancun upgrade that will follow Shanghai. Cancun is the implementation of EIP-4844, known as Proto-Danksharding or The Surge, which aims to increase the scalability of Layer 2 rollups by 100 times and prime Ethereum for sharding.
