In the streamed Execution Layer Meeting on March 16, developers of Ethereum declared that the blockchain has a planned upgrade date of April 12, which is in 27 days. Beacon chain push withdrawals will be implemented as part of the upgrade, also known as the Shanghai-Capella upgrade or Shapella. This will allow validators on the Ethereum network to handle withdrawal operations after the ruleset modification.
Countdown Begins: Ethereum’s Validator Withdrawal and Fee Optimization Upgrade Nears
The value of ether held by the Beacon chain contract is 17,680,535, which amounts to $29.33 billion based on today’s Ethereum exchange rates. The upcoming upgrade, Shapella, will empower the Beacon chain to utilize push withdrawals as operations with the help of Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 4895.
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The EIP-4895 documentation states it will enable validator withdrawals from the Beacon chain to the EVM using a new system-level operation type. Furthermore, the summary highlights that EIP-4895’s design is push-based rather than pull-based, indicating that withdrawals must be processed in the execution layer immediately after dequeuing from the consensus layer.
The most recent Ethereum upgrade was initially scheduled for this month, but the consensus change was delayed. At the Execution Layer Meeting held on Thursday, it was announced by Ethereum developers that the upgrade has been rescheduled to take place on April 12, 2023.
The upgrade will also implement EIP-3651, EIP-6049, EIP-3860, and EIP-3855, in addition to the Beacon chain push withdrawals proposal. These modifications try to optimize costs, such as limiting the maximum init code size to 49152 bytes and imposing an additional gas cost of 2 for every 32-byte init code chunk, as specified in EIP-3860.
Testing of the upgrade was carried out by Ethereum developers on multiple testnets recently. On Tuesday, the developers completed the Goerli testnet upgrade, which was a crucial step before the activation of Shapella on the main net.
