The decision to consider eight Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) for inclusion in the network’s impending “Shanghai” hard fork was made by the Ethereum developers on Thursday.
The hard fork upgrade, which may also contain recommendations to address scalability issues and enhance the Ethereum Virtual Machine, will enable withdrawals of Beacon Chain staked ETH. However, it is not yet clear when that will occur.
When EIPs are “considered for inclusion” (CFI), it signifies that the developers agree to work on them and put them to the test on developer networks (devnets). None of these concepts, however, are guaranteed to be chosen for inclusion in Shanghai.
Beacon Chain withdrawals, or EIP 4895, were decidedly going to be a part of the fork before the core developers even got together. This implies that anyone who locked up their ether stakes in the Beacon Chain smart contract before the Merge will be able to access them, along with any extra collected prizes, after Ethereum undergoes its next upgrade.
Developers decided which EIPs they will concentrate their work on before Shanghai, but they couldn’t agree on a deadline for the mainnet rollout of the hard fork. The Ethereum Foundation stated that staked ETH will be released 6–12 months after the Merge, however, there were talks of altering this schedule.
The timing for Shanghai was still unclear after this call. Some developers want to hasten Shanghai and implement it in March 2023 with just the ETH withdrawal EIP and a few other smaller EIPs. Proto-danksharding, a second fork that would arrive somewhere in the fall of 2023, would then offer another major scaling enhancement. On the other hand, many developers seek an all-included Shanghai makeover and incorporate all significant changes at once.
Proto-danksharding, also known as EIP 4844, is currently included in the CFI package. EIP 4844 is a critical first step the protocol would take toward sharding, a technique that divides the network into “shards” in order to enhance its capacity and reduce gas fees, in order to make the network more scalable.
The batch included the development of the EVM Object Format (EOF), a group of EIPs that effectively update the Ethereum Virtual Machine— the setting in which Ethereum can run smart contracts. Several improvements aim to make smart contract execution safer by confirming that specific requirements are met. The Ethereum Virtual Machine will be upgraded as a result of EIPs 3540, 3670, 4200, 4570, and 5450.
EIP 2537, which would add “BLS precompile,” is the final proposal that is being thought about for inclusion. With this suggestion, Ethereum might enable improved compatibility with the Beacon Chain and produce cryptographic proofs that are more secure.