According to a January 31 post by Ethereum Foundation developer Parithosh Jayanthi, the “Zhejiang” public withdrawal testnet will start on February 1 at 15:00 UTC. Six days after Zhejiang, the Shanghai and Capella testnets will also be triggered at 1350. Jayanthi notes:
“This is also a good opportunity for all tools to test how they collect, display and use withdrawal information. You can try changing your credentials 0x00 to 0x01 and setting withdrawal addresses. You can test partial withdrawals and full withdrawals by exiting your validator.
The Shanghai upgrade, when fully implemented, will allow asset withdrawals and users’ Ether (ETH) rewards. Since the successful upgrade of Ethereum Merge in September 2020, users have been able to issue ETH on the proof-of-stake network. However, the funds remain locked, pending a new patch.
Zhejiang public test will be broadcast tomorrow (Feb 1 15:00 UTC, 2023). Shanghai+Capella will be triggered 6 days later (in era 1350). You will be able to deposit validators, practice BLS changes and exit without risk. All links here: https://t.co/XNlsDIG0cm pic.twitter.com/sKKDJmolt2
— Barnabas Busa (@BarnabasBusa) January 31, 2023
As mentioned by fellow Ethereum developer Barnabas Busa, Zhejiang will be the first public testnet launched after the Merge upgrade. Although still in beta, the full withdrawal source code has been published on the Ethereum website.
related: Ethereum developers are targeting March 2023 for the Shanghai hard fork
Developers at the Ethereum Foundation have targeted a tentative date of March 2023 for the highly anticipated Shanghai hard fork. In addition, the upcoming Zhejiang testnet will also feature all Ethereum Enhanced Protocols (EIPs) included in the Shanghai upgrade, such as timestamp-based forking.
After Shanghai, the next upgrade on the developer’s roadmap is the EIP-4844, which will be released in May or June this year. Experts say that EIP-4844 can increase the scalability of layer-2 rollups on Ethereum by a factor of 100x and lower transaction fees.