Ethereum : Shapella rollout date April 12?

After a long wait, the Ethereum Foundation has officially announced that the Shapella update, which will allow to withdraw ethers in staking, will be activated on April 12th 2023.

Indeed, the deployment of Shapella (Capella + Shanghai) on Ethereum will take place in 2 weeks. More precisely at epoch 194048, scheduled on April 12th 2023 at 22:27:35 UTC. On the Ethereum blockchain, the term epoch is used to refer to a set of 32 blocks on the network.

In recent months, ETH staking withdrawals have been simulated on several testnets, including recently Goerli. Developers were able to verify the proper functioning of Shapella before its arrival on the Ethereum mainnet.

After a smooth transition from Goerli, the client teams scheduled the upgrade of Shapella for activation on the mainnet. Consensus was quickly reached for April 12 at the 157th AllCoreDevs Execution Layer meeting,” the Ethereum Foundation wrote in a blog post.

Blockchain cybersecurity experts can now collect up to half a million dollars for identifying a major vulnerability affecting Shapella.

The overall Shapella implementation will introduce EIP-4895 into the Ethereum network, a new feature that will allow the removal of staked ETH. In parallel, Shapella also includes other network enhancements to optimize transaction fees for certain activities that have been pre-tested on several testnets.