The Shanghai and Capella Upgrades, collectively known as Shapella, will enable staked ETH withdrawals for the first time since ETH staking was introduced in December 2020, releasing about 17.6 million ETH, or over $30 billion at current rates. The mainnet launch will occur at slot 6209536, on April 12, 10:27 pm UTC, Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko announced Thursday.
Although some community members were initially in doubt whether the date tweeted by Beiko was indeed the date of Shapella going live, the announcement was later confirmed by Ethereum researcher and Arbitrum dev known under the alias “terence.eth.”
“Babe wake up staking withdrawals are coming,” Ethereum bull and community educator Anthony Sassano cheered in his quote tweet to Beiko’s announcement.
The final dress rehearsal for Shapella took place on Tuesday, when the upgrade was executed on the Goerli test network at around 10:25 pm UTC. The hard fork initially suffered from low network participation, as several validators didn’t upgrade their client software on time.
“One challenge with testnet validators is that given the ETH is worthless, there’s less incentive to run a validator/monitor it,” Tim Beiko explained at the time.
Shapella upgrade comes amid increased regulatory pressure on the crypto industry, as SEC Chairman Gary Gensler has recently suggested that all proof-of-stake tokens are securities when speaking to reporters after a commission vote on Wednesday.
"Whatever they're promoting and putting into a protocol, and locking up their tokens in a protocol, a protocol that's often a small group of entrepreneurs and developers are developing, I would just suggest that each of these token operators ... seek to come into compliance, and the same with the intermediaries," Gensler said, quoted by The Block.
