Ethereum developers decided to release the anticipated Shanghai upgrade in March 2023 during the year’s last All Core Developers meeting on December 8, 2022.
After the successful completion of the Ethereum Merge on September 15, 2022, the Shanghai upgrade, formally known as Ethereum Improvement Proposal 4895, would permit validators to withdraw their staked ETH from the Beacon Chain consensus layer. The Shanghai upgrade is a step toward a scalability upgrade, which would enhance the network transaction speed.
With intentions to launch a public testnet on December 15 or December 16, 2022, developer Marius van der Wijden revealed that full and partial withdrawals were functioning on two private Ethereum testnets.
A testnet is a clone of the blockchain, such as Ethereum, that mimics the behaviour of the main chain. Developers of smart contracts can test their programmes without running the risk of losing actual money.
Following van der Wijden’s report, teams working on well-known Ethereum clients provided the group with an update on their preparedness. Clients are software applications that transform standard computers into nodes that add to the Ethereum network’s security.
Geth, Besus, Erigon, and Nethermind are well-known variants of execution clients, while Lighthouse, Lodestar, Nimbus, Prysm, and Teku are well-known variants of consensus clients, according to the Ethereum Foundation. Developers of the Lodestar and Teku consensus clients affirmed that they are ready for testing. Clients would first have to communicate with a public testnet.
The Teku client team’s client was “code-ready and feature-ready,” according to one of its developers, but the Erigon team said that their client still required improvement.
The developers also talked about possible major delays that would result from integrating EIP-4844 in the March 2023 Shanghai upgrade. An improvement termed danksharding will offer a new transaction type called blobs, which will carry less expensive data, and EIP-4844 will put the foundation in place to handle it. Blobs will be kept on the consensus layer of the beacon chain rather than the execution layer.
To set up upcoming Ethereum sharding upgrades that will increase scalability, EIP-4844, also known as proto-danksharding, will make substantial adjustments.
Without adequate scheduling, developer Peter Szilagyi cautioned against integrating proto-danksharding in the upgrade. Another developer who goes by the name “danny” made the observation that producing incorrect code that is intricately linked to the system costs money to undo later. EIP-4844 was postponed until the following update since the majority of developers felt that enabling withdrawals should be the priority.
If all client development teams were unable to test their code at the next meeting on January 5, 2023, the all-core devs team also decided to omit Ethereum Virtual Machine Object Format (EOF) from the Shanghai update. The execution layer of the Ethereum network is modified by the EOF update.