In the night of April 13, at 01:30 (Kyiv/Moscow time), Ethereum developers activated the Shapella update on the project’s mainnet. Users gained the ability to withdraw cryptocurrency from staking.
The hard fork occurred on epoch #194 048, which had been finalised. Developers noted that the network observed a few missed blocks, but on the whole the update went smoothly and the blockchain appears stable.
According to the parsec service, ETH withdrawals have begun. At the time of writing, validators had unlocked more than 3,100 ETH. Meanwhile, funds continue to flow into the deposit contract.
According to beaconcha.in, withdrawals (full and partial) had processed about 8,835 ETH (~$16.96 million at the current rate) roughly 50 minutes after the hard fork was implemented — the amount continues to grow.
Withdrawals are expected by more than 4,000 validators, with over 3,000 in the queue.
Geth client developer Marius Van Der Wijden noted that each block validators on average withdraw around 45 ETH — 16 withdrawals of 3 ETH each.
Withdrawals are working, seeing ~45 ETH being withdrawn per block (16 withdrawals à ~3ETH each)
Looks very good to me! pic.twitter.com/NCTO2FahiW
— MariusVanDerWijden (@vdWijden) April 12, 2023
According to Nansen, full withdrawal is available for 7,948 validators, whose balances total 284,622 ETH (more than $546 million). The total amount of assets in staking exceeds 18 million ETH.
Moreover, 56% of validators’ addresses lack the 0x01 prefix — this data type is required to unlock assets.
In September 2022, Ethereum activated The Merge, which saw the blockchain move to the consensus algorithm Proof-of-Stake. Participants of the mainnet gained access to staking — directly (validators) or through specialized protocols like Lido.
Shapella includes changes for the execution layers (Shanghai) and the consensus (Capella). The most important is the ability to withdraw ETH from the deposit contract Beacon Chain.
Developers have also reduced gas costs for executing certain transaction types, optimised data storage on the blockchain, implemented a number of EVM-related improvements and introduced new cryptographic primitives.
We detailed the hard fork’s ecosystem impact in a dedicated piece:
Ethereum prices reacted to Shapella’s activation with volatility, but no material price movements were observed. At the time of writing the cryptocurrency trades near $1,920.
Digital assets in the top-10 by market cap did not show a notable reaction to the activation of the update. A similar pattern is observed among tokens in the liquid staking segment.
As ForkLog notes, in the long run the hard fork will lead to a positive trajectory for Ethereum’s price due to reduced risk for investors.