Shanghai's hard fork is scheduled for March 2023 by Ethereum developers.

The 151st Ethereum Core Developers Meeting took place on December 8, and discussions there revealed that core programmer have established a possible timeframe of March 2023 for Ethereum's Shanghai hard fork. Additionally, programmers plan to roll out the Ethereum Improvement Protocol (EIP) 4844 update, which would bring proto-danksharding to the network, in May or June 2023.

Despite the completion of the eagerly awaited proof-of-stake Merge upgrade on September 15, staked Ether (stETH) is currently locked. Nearly 3.5 million stETH ($4.48 billion) of the token, which was developed by the decentralized financial protocol Lido, are currently in use. Users of stETH can only access their funds following the Shanghai upgrade, including with any applicable staking incentives for confirming transaction processing. According to the Ethereum Foundation, this organizational strategy was used to “simplify and optimize attention on a successful transition to proof-of-stake” throughout the upgrades.

The EIP-4844 upgrade is designed to include a new data-blob-transaction prototype that was originally created by developers on February 21, 2022, following the hard fork. Optimistic Rollups, a layer-2 technology, allows Ethereum processing and network data to be moved off-chain, increasing scalability by 10x to 100x. The capability of rollups is expected to increase by up to 100x with the introduction of big portable packages that can hold cheaper data in Ethereum transactions. While the change will reduce transaction costs for layer-2 solutions, it will have no impact on the cost of Ethereum gas.

Last December, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated that his ultimate goal was to enable the blockchain to serve as a simple base layer, with users “fully comfortable storing their assets in a ZK [zero knowledge]-rollup running a full EVM [Ethereum Virtual Machine].” Buterin also cautioned that partitioning and data accessibility sampling are “complex technologies” and therefore would require years of audits and improvement to enact.

What comes after that？

Ethereum developers will begin working on validating the code now that the complete scope of what will be included in Shanghai has largely been decided. To address any flaws with some of the EIPs they may have included in Shanghai, Ethereum developers built the Shandong testnet last month. However, that testnet has already been discontinued. Following the conversation on Thursday, engineers plan to introduce a fresh public testnet for Shanghai sometime between December 15 and 16. In the coming month, Ethereum researchers will concentrate their efforts on making Shanghai as seamless as possible before attempting to launch mainnet shadow forks in mid- to late January.

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