Top Crypto News Today: The Next Phase In Ethereum Upgrade Is Here – Ethereum Shanghai Update Has a Testnet!

Starting the year 2022 with promises from the Ethereum Developing Team about the Merge getting a set date had finally found its place in crypto history on 15 September 2022. A historic day that was a steady process for 2 whole years! With the Ethereum Network successfully transitioning from the Proof of Work to Proof of Stake consensus, the network now runs with much less energy consumption. 

Following the Merge, the co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik told the Blankless Podcast that, “I think there are two big priorities. One of the priorities is to get scaling figured out. And I mean that at all layers of the ecosystem, like getting the Ethereum protocol fully roll-up ready, which includes things like prototank sharding, getting roll-ups themselves to be fully ready for users, getting applications on top of them, getting good bridge infrastructure between them, getting all the wallets to support them… Not just helping the transition to a fully roll-up-centric Ethereum complete. 

Then, the other one is a transition from Ethereum being in rapid developing firefighting mode to Ethereum being in stability mode. I think it’s a transition that has to happen and I do think that to some extent it’s an inevitable transition because as the ecosystem grows, the cost of changing things increases, and then there starts being all these regulatory concerns and lots of existing stakeholders…”

As explained by Vitalik himself, back in July, the Merge is set to be followed by The Surge, The Verge, The Purge, and The Splurge. The first of which is the Shanghai Update; of which Shandong is the testnet! The Shanghai upgrade, for which Shandong is the testnet, is projected to happen at some point in 2023. With the Shandong testnet the developers will be able to experiment with the next phases of Ethereum development. The Ethereum Improvement Proposals, also referred to as, EIP, that are being considered to be included within Shanghai could help in addressing some efficiency and scalability issues. 

We are happy to announce the launch of an early Pre-Shanghai testnet we are calling “Shandong”. 🔥https://t.co/1HpFTPUMOU

This is an experimental testnet run in cooperation with EF DevOps which activates a set of selected Shanghai-considered EIPs for early client testing.

🧵: https://t.co/VJ4kWxupG3

— EF JavaScript Team (@EFJavaScript) October 14, 2022

This talk about the next steps also includes the most anticipated proposal is EIP 4895,  which will allow proper implementation of staked Ether withdrawals on the Beacon Chain. It also suggested the withdrawals come with any rewards they have earned over time!

The other EIPs that are being considered apart from EIP 4895 are:

• EIP 4844: This introduces proto-danksharding. This proposal will help in allowing more data to be processed on the ETH network; therefore decreasing gas prices. Danksharding, named after the researcher Dankrad Feist; means sharding for a rollup-centric age.
• EIP 3540: This EIP is related to one of the previous EIPs that was included in Ethereum’s London upgrade; i.e. EIP 3541. It will deal with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) for Ethereum smart contracts. The proposal states that it will allow for code and data to be separated in order to make changes to EVM easier in the future.

“The Shandong testnet is meant to give developers a chance to try out the potential EIPs to find issues,” said Parithosh Jayanthi, a DevOps engineer at the Ethereum Foundation.

Source: CoinDesk

Additional Read: Ethereum Price Prediction