• Ethereum developers announced that the blockchain is scheduled to upgrade on April 12, in 27 days, which will include the implementation of Beacon chain push withdrawals.
• This will enable network validators to support withdrawal operations following the ruleset change, as well as optimize fees through EIP-3651, EIP-6049, EIP-3860 and EIP-3855.
• The developers have been testing the upgrade on several testnets and completed Goerli testnet upgrade on Tuesday ahead of Shapella’s activation on mainnet.
Ethereum Upgrade Scheduled for April 12
Ethereum developers announced that the blockchain is scheduled to upgrade on April 12, 2023 in 27 days. This upgrade is known as Shanghai-Capella or Shapella and will include the implementation of Beacon chain push withdrawals. The latest Ethereum upgrade was originally planned for this month but was postponed until April 12th.
Beacon Chain Withdrawals & Fee Optimization Enhancements
The Beacon chain contract holds 17,680,535 ether at the time of writing worth $29.33 billion using today’s Ethereum exchange rates. Push withdrawals will be enabled via a new ’system-level‘ operation type according to Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 4895 architecture which is ‚push‘-based rather than ‚pull‘-based meaning withdrawals must be processed in the execution layer as soon as they are dequeued from the consensus layer.
In addition to push withdrawals, Shapella will also include fee optimizations such as limiting initcode size to 49152 and applying an extra gas cost of 2 for every 32 byte chunk of initcode according to EIP 3860 documentation.
Testing & Final Preparations Ahead of Mainnet Launch
The development team has been conducting testing of the upcoming upgrades on several testnets prior to its launch on mainnet with Goerli testnet being upgraded successfully last Tuesday marking an important step towards activating Shapella on mainnet.
Implications & Benefits Of Upgrade
The upcoming upgrade marks an important milestone for Ethereum offering numerous benefits both in terms of increasing its scalability by enabling quicker transactions and improving security with improved consensus algorithms while also providing network validators with more options when it comes to withdrawal operations following rule set changes as well better fee optimization options resulting in lower costs for users who interact with contracts deployed onto Ethereum blockchain platform.
Conclusion
Overall this is an exciting development for Ethereum ecosystem ensuring it remains competitive within cryptocurrency space while offering additional features and benefits which can be leveraged by its users making it more attractive compared to other blockchains currently available in market place .