The target date for the highly anticipated Shanghai hard fork on Ethereum has now been set: April 12th. Ethereum core developers approved the target deadline during the All Core Developers Execution Layer #157 call on March 16.
The Shanghai mainnet upgrade has five Ethereum Improvement Proposals, including EIP-4985, which will enable the withdrawal of Ether (ETH) staked on the Beacon Chain, completing Ethereum’s transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus.
The target date – April 12 at 10:27:35 pm UTC, epoch 620.9536 – will now be confirmed by the developers on GitHub. The fork was originally predicted to be in March, but the developers pushed it back to early April.
6209536 12/4/2023, 10:27:35 UTC
— timbeiko.eth (@TimBeiko) March 16, 2023
The validator will automatically receive reward payments at periodic intervals at the withdrawal address. In addition, the staker can exit the entire position, recovering the full balance.
According to Etherscan, the Ethereum PoS smart contract has attracted more than 17.6 million ETH, worth almost $29.4 billion at the time of publication. Analysts predict that the upgrade could trigger a sell-off in the short term, as Cointelegraph reported.
The transition to PoS officially begins on September 15, 2022 with Merge, an important milestone for Ethereum that replaces miners with validators and introduces ETH staking as a key component of the network. The Ethereum roadmap has several updates after Shanghai, including “Surge,” “Verge,” “Purge” and “Splurge.”
The move to PoS consensus could have regulatory implications for ETH and the crypto space. In September 2022, the Chairman of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission Gary Gensler suggested that the blockchain transition may bring ETH under the radar of regulators.
After a recent crackdown on crypto companies that provide staking services in the US, Gensler again suggested on March 15 that proof-of-stake coins could become securities:
“Whatever is promoted and included in the protocol, and locking the token in the protocol, a protocol that is often developed by a group of entrepreneurs and developers, I just recommend that every operator of the token. […] seek to fulfill, and be like a mediator.”