Ethereum devs confirm the postponement of the Shanghai upgrade

Users have been eagerly waiting for Ethereum’s Shanghai upgrade that will allow withdrawals of ETH Staking. However, it was announced this week by the core developers of ETH over a call that the upgrade has been pushed to April and will most likely take place in the initial weeks of the month.

Although the Shanghai upgrade had been securely slated for the March release, many ETH developers started to doubt in January that timeline may not stick. 

ETH core developers now aim to launch the Goerli testnet around 14th March, which is basically a comprehensive rehearsal of the grand Shanghai upgrade. If everything proceeds smoothly, in the following month, the actual Shanghai update will be launched mid-April. 

The actual timing of the implementation is being closely watched owing to the seismic financial implication of the upgrade ever since ETH started transitioning to the proof of stake paradigm, where all ETH transactions are verified by the users who have staked and accumulated rewards for network participation to generate more ETH. 

Ever since Ethereum staking was initiated in December 2020, ETH deposits have increased by a whopping $28.7 billion, which is around 14.5% of the overall Ethereum tokens in circulation. 

The funds and rewards that users have spawned, however, will not be available for withdrawals anytime soon. Hence, the main component of the Shanghai upgrade is to allow Ethereum users to extract their staked ETH tokens. 

Currently, the largest platforms that are staking with the Ethereum network are intermediary crypto staking services such as Lido and popular crypto exchanges like Kraken, Binance, and Coinbase. 

These four companies pool together all the Ethereum tokens of their customers in order to stake them and generate passive rewards, which currently stand at 56% of the overall ETH-staked tokens with the Ethereum network.

Therefore, efforts are still being made so that the Ethereum upgrade can take place without much further delay.