Testnet Sepolia Ethereum blockchain has undergone a successful upgrade that simulates the upcoming Shanghai hard fork that is expected to take place in March on the network’s mainnet.
The “Shapella” upgrade, which combines the names of the Shanghai hard fork and the upcoming Capella, was successfully implemented on the testnet on February 28.
Sepolia testnet has successfully updated to Shapella!
Some Prsym validators are offline due to old geth versions. They will be online in the next 10 minutes!
Next stop: Goerli pic.twitter.com/pb43Gq7w9C
— terence.eth (@terencechain) February 28, 2023
Shanghai is the name of the fork on the client side of the execution layer and Capella is the name of the upgrade on the client side of the consensus layer. One major change allows validators to withdraw Ether (stETH) from the Beacon Chain back to the execution layer among other new functions.
Related: Lido Finance activates staking rate limit after more than 150,000 ETH stake
Validators are required to stake 32 Ether (ETH) to validate Ethereum blocks. They will now be able to withdraw rewards of more than 32 ETH and be allowed to keep validating while those who want to withdraw completely can take all 32 ETH plus rewards and stop validating.
The next step before the Shanghai fork goes live on the mainnet will be releasing an upgrade on Goerli’s Ethereum testnet which is expected to start in March.