Ethereum devs set date for Shapella fork and mainnet announcement
Ethereum Foundation’s support team has published an official blog post to announce a major update for Shapella. The 157th AllCoreDevs Execution Layer meeting was held recently, and it has been decided that the mainnet update will go live on April 12, 2023, at 22:27:35 UTC. That is when the epoch is 194048.
Shapella combines changes to three different layers, namely Shanghai, Capella, and Engine API. The development follows the Goerli testnet transition. Also, the support team has announced a bug bounty to identify vulnerabilities. The value of bounty has been doubled, and it will remain that way till April 05, 2023.
Shanghai, or the execution layer, comes with five changes, as mentioned below:
- Warm COINBASE
- PUSH0 instruction
- Beacon chain push withdrawals as operations
- Limit & meter initcode
- Deprecate SELFDESTRUCT
The SELFDESTRUCT, or EIP-6049, is merely a deprecation warning, the semantics of which are expected to undergo changes in future upgrades to the network. All changes to the execution layer are available in viewing mode in Ethereum Execution Layer Specification.
Capella, or Consensus Layer, has a total of three upgrades. Details can be viewed in the v1.3.0-rc.5 specifications. Upgrades introduced to Capella are:
- Withdrawal for validators – partial or full
- A replacement to the original singular historical roots with the introduction of an independent state & block historical accumulator
- Facility for validators to update BLS_WITHDRAWAL_PREFIX to ETH1_ADDRESS_WITHDRAWAL_PREFIX
Withdrawal FAQs are live for validators to seek answers to all their questions. In case a question does not exist in the list, then the support team of the Ethereum Foundation can come in handy.
The Engine API’s changes are live in shanghai.md file. The entire WithdrawalV1 structure has been added to methods and structure based on their relevance, and changes post The Merge has been bundled in the latest release of the repository.
Shapella, in its previous version, lacked compatibility with the mainnet upgrade. That has been resolved, and the release now supports Capella and Shanghai on the Ethereum mainnet.
Ethereum reflects the effect of the announcement by recording an increase of around 4% in the past 24 hours. ETH is exchanging hands at $1,780. While that is lower than the highest value of $4,878, as seen in November 2021, the increase is still praiseworthy as it is inching closer to breaking the record of $1,800 at the time of drafting this article.
The rise in the price of ETH also comes as good news since it has been reported to have recovered all the losses incurred from the CFTC Binance lawsuit reports.
Users holding ETH in their wallet are not required to do anything from their side unless they are informed to do so by the service provider. However, a non-staking node operator is required to update the node to the version recommended by the support team. The same principle applies to stakers, with the difference that they must update not just the validator client but also the beacon node.
