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Ethereum Developers Plan for Shanghai Hard Fork in March 2023

The Ethereum Merge was one of the most significant events this year in the history of the Ethereum blockchain. Now, the developers of the Ethereum blockchain are working on further developments. On Thursday, December 8, Ethereum developers announced that the network’s next hard fork “Shanghai” will have a target release time of March 2023. One of the major excitements around “Shanghai” is that this hard fork will allow investors to withdraw their ETH staked with validators.

With the implementation of the Ethereum Improvement Protocol (EIP) 4895, users will be able to withdraw their Beacon Chain staked Ether. In the Shanghai hard fork, the Ethereum developers have also agreed to address the implementation of “EVM Object Format” (EOF).

This is basically a compilation of EIPs that will upgrade the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), the platform where Ethereum executes smart contracts. This list of EIPs includes EIP 3540, EIP 3670, EIP 4200, EIP 4570, and EIP 5450.

Next month on January 5th, there’s an All Core Developers call planned. The developers will try to implement the EOF by then. If the implementation doesn’t happen by then, they will push it to the fall to the fall so that they won’t delay the withdrawals of staked ETH any further.

Another Hard Fork after Shanghai

After Shanghai, developers are also planning for a second hard fork in the fall of 2023. This fork would address a significant scaling upgrade also called EIP 4844. Dubbed “proto-danksharding,” the EIP 4844 would further improve the network capacity to handle more transactions.

Additionally, the EIP 4844 will bring a new kind of transaction format to Ethereum dubbed “shard blob transactions”. This would allow to store off-chain data and access it via Ethereum nodes temporarily while addressing the scaling needs of blockchain apps.

Over the next months, Ethereum developers will be working on testing the code for the Shanghai upgrade. Last month in November, the Ethereum developers also launched the Shandong testnet for resolving bugs related to some of the EIPs which might come along with the Shanghai hard fork.

After yesterday’s call, the developers have agreed to launch a new public testnet for Shanghai by next week December 15-16. As said, Ethereum developers will focus all their efforts on making the launch of the Shanghai hard fork as smooth as possible.

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Ethereum Developers Plan for Shanghai Hard Fork in March 2023