Ethereum team outlines Shanghai activation schedule for mainnet

Ethereum developers planned activation of the Shanghai-Capella (Shapella) hard fork in the mainnet for roughly mid-April.

Teams were suggesting roughly 4 weeks after that for a potential mainnet fork, giving them 1 week to put out + test a release, and then 2+ weeks of heads up for people to upgrade their nodes.

— timbeiko.eth (@TimBeiko) March 2, 2023

The update opens the possibility of withdrawing assets from staking.

On March 2, during a call dedicated to activation of Shapella in the Sepolia testnet, the developers set the Goerli testnet upgrade date for March 14.

Two days after the event, they will hold another online meeting to discuss the results of the update.

“Client teams proposed roughly four weeks after that day for a potential mainnet fork, allowing themselves a week to release and test the release, and then two or more weeks for operators to upgrade their nodes,” said lead developer Tim Beiko.

According to him, specialists have already begun discussing issues related to the subsequent Cancun upgrade. It will activate EIP-4844.

For background, the EL and CL currently use two different encoding formats: RLP (EL) and SSZ (CL). With EIP-4844, we’ll be introducing some SSZ on the EL, it’s worth thinking about how to approach this more broadly. Here’s some more context: https://t.co/4k3lhktYde

— timbeiko.eth (@TimBeiko) March 2, 2023

“Currently, execution layers (EL) and consensus (CL) use two different encodings — RLP and SSZ, respectively. With EIP-4844 we will partially implement SSZ on the EL,” Beiko said.

This unification will simplify transaction validation, making them easier to process at low internet bandwidth, and will also reduce the load on light clients, the developer explained.

The discussion of potentially including other EIPs in the fork continues.

The Ethereum team implemented the concept of account abstraction, activating the ERC-4337 standard via a smart contract.