Shanghai Upgrade Hard Fork goes live on Ethereum’s Sepolia Testnet

In major positive news coming out from the world of Ethereum, the Shanghai Capella upgrade has finally gone live on the second Ethereum testnet called Sepolia just a few hours ago. With this hard fork on the Sepolia testnet, this one was able to successfully process ETH withdrawals, bringing the Ethereum blockchain closer to the Shanghai Upgrade.

The Shanghai Upgrade has definitely been one of the most highly anticipated events in the world of crypto since the Ethereum Merge that took place back in the middle of September 2022. The Shanghai Upgrade will essentially mark the Ethereum blockchain’s complete transition from a proof-of-work (PoW) based blockchain to a fully functional proof-of-stake (PoS) network. This move would enable validators to withdraw rewards earned from adding or approving blocks to the blockchain.

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Sepolia testnet has successfully upgraded to Shapella! 🌃

Some of the Prsym validators are offline due to the old geth version. They will come online in the next 10 mins!

Next stop: Goerli pic.twitter.com/pb43Gq7w9C

— terence.eth (@terencechain) February 28, 2023

This upgrade was triggered at epoch 56832 at around 4:04 UTC and finalized at 4:17 UTC. The Sepolia testnet was designed as a sandbox environment for developers on the Ethereum blockchain to test out new upgrades before taking them onto the mainnet. It serves as a rehearsal before the actual performance, that mimics what will exactly happen on the mainnet, within the safety of the testnet. Since testnets typically copy the mainnet, it allows developers to test and weed out any bugs and faults in the code before any upgrade is pushed out onto the mainnet.

This upgrade is being called Shapella as it combines Shanghai (which is the fork’s name on the execution layer client side) and Capella (which is the upgrade name on the consensus layer client side).

Sepolia happens to be the second testnet that Ethereum developers work on before implementing any major development to the mainnet. Up next is the Goerli, which serves as the final testnet environment where Ethereum developers run any major upgrades on to weed out any final problems from the code to ensure reliability. Thus Goerli will be the last testnet upgrade that is expected to happen sometime in the coming weeks and would be the final step before the main Ethereum blockchain is able to process staked ETH withdrawals.

Ever since the Beacon chain was launched back in December 2020, those who wanted to be a validator on the new Ethereum 2.0, which was going to be based on the proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism – interested people had to stake 32 ETH or above to qualify for that. These staked ETH tokens were locked up for an indefinite period of time, until now, when we have some light at the end of the tunnel and the actual mainnet withdrawal feature to be released very soon.

According to a report by CoinDesk, if developers continue to run test upgrades three weeks apart as they have been doing, then the next testnet upgrade on Goerli can be expected to occur somewhere around the third week of March. This would further push the actual Ethereum mainnet Shanghai Upgrade down to April. Considering this, there is going to be a slight delay in the earlier guidance given by Ethereum developers that the Ethereum Shanghai Upgrade was going to take place in March.

Despite this announcement, Ethereum’s native token, ETH was trading down about 2.6% in the past 24 hours at about $1630 as of writing this article.

Values as on 28 February 2023.