Ethereum’s network upgrade Shanghai is set for March 2023

Ethereum core developers have agreed on a tentative deadline for the blockchain network’s next upgrade dubbed Shanghai. It’s the latest in Ethereum news after the success of the Merge in September, and coincided with a bump in the price of ether.

On Friday, the ether price rose to highs of $1,290 as bulls looked to retest the $1,300 zone again. The Ethereum price was 4.1% up on the day, the most gain among the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market cap.

Ethereum’s Shanghai to go live in March

Following discussions at the latest All Core Devs meeting of 2022 held on 8 December, the team settled on March 2023 as the date of this highly anticipated upgrade.

Ethereum Foundation developer Tim Beiko shared the suggested timelines via a Twitter thread.

Notably, the development comes a few months after Ethereum completed the historic transition from a proof-of-work network to a proof-of-stake system. Before the September switch called the Merge happened, the Ethereum community had deposited billions worth of the native token ETH to the Beacon Chain.

Shanghai is important to those who helped secure the network by locking their tokens since the ETH 2.0 contract opened in November 2020. More than 15 million ETH tokens are currenty locked up and validators will be able to withdraw their funds once the network upgrade ships.

Other than the Shanghai hard fork, the core devs also scheduled the Ethereum Improvement Proposal 4844 (EIP-4844) for the fall.

Together, Ethereum is looking to not only bring withdrawals of staked ether to the community, but also help improve network scalability and lower fees for Layer 2 rollups.

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