Ethereum developers plan to launch the Ethereum Shanghai upgrade in March 2023, which will enable staking withdrawals. What’s in the Ethereum Shanghai upgrade and what’s not?
Key milestone: Ethereum Shanghai upgrade
Ethereum core developers focused on Shanghai before implementing Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP)-4884 on The Surge. Accordingly, the team chose to prioritize enabling staking withdrawals with the Shanghai upgrade. This will be the next major milestone in Ethereum’s roadmap. Among other things, the Ethereum Shanghai upgrade will allow ETH stakers/validators to be withdrawn from the Beacon Chain.
By the way, EIP-4884 is also very important. It was also originally expected to be bundled with Shanghai by offering ‘proto-danksharding’ to significantly improve layer-2 aggregation scalability (The Surge) before the full implementation of the major Sharding upgrade later next year. However, things changed at the Ethereum Core Developers Meeting on December 8, according to Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko. The team addressed the case that the EIP-4844 was not ready on time. Accordingly, the final consensus was for Shanghai to avoid any possible delays.
Tim Beiko made a statement about the upgrade
Tim Beiko shared a summary thread on the subject on Twitter. Beiko noted that everyone agreed that “(1) Shanghai should happen quickly, ideally around March, and (2) follow through with a fork based on EIP-4844.” While EIP-4844 will not be included, the developers have agreed to include a number of EIPs that essentially upgrade the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), including a new EVM contract format, code/data separations, and new transaction codes.
Beiko says these upgrades, known as EVM Object Format (EOF), are pretty easy to go back and remove from Shanghai if developers haven’t finished working on them when Shanghai is ready to implement. So it states that the EOF will simply be removed and sent. Additionally, a number of previously agreed-upon EIPs will be rolled out with Shanghai. The list includes EIP-3651: Warm Coinbase, EIP-3855: PUSH0 instruction, EIP-3860: Limit and counter start code, and EIP-4895: Beacon chain push withdrawals.
Both @vdWijden and @yperbasis made the point that even if an EIP is relatively small/well tested/etc., there are only a limited number of them client teams can work with within a single update, and every incremental one does have overhead with reviews, testing, etc.
— timbeiko.eth (@TimBeiko) December 8, 2022
What will the upgrade bring to Blockchain?
EIP-3651: Warm Coinbase in particular will potentially have some cost reduction benefits for the network. By the way, Coinbase should not be confused with the name of the crypto exchange. This refers to the name of the software that the builders use to get new tokens on the network. Every new transaction on the platform needs to interact with the Coinbase software multiple times. However, Coinbase essentially needs time to warm up. So, initial transactions will start out more expensive.
This will no longer be the case with the new EIP implementation. This will lower gas charges when builders interact with it. According to the Ethereum Foundation, Sharding is a multi-stage upgrade that will significantly increase the ‘scalability and capacity’ of Ethereum. Sharding will provide the network with significant ‘more capacity to store and access data’. It will also do this via shard-chains.
With its enhanced data storage capabilities, it will basically provide much lower transaction fees for tier-2 solutions. Once all this is done, the network’s next big event and roadmap will be on the agenda. This is the Sharding upgrade, which is expected to be released in 2023 and 2024.
First of all, the developers have agreed on the scope of the upcoming Shanghai update, as we reported on Kriptokoin.com. The upgrade will include some existential points like staked Ethereum withdrawals, implementation of the EVM Object Format, time-based EL fork, and more.
Ethereum devs agreed on the scope of Shanghai today. It’s going to be:
– staked ETH withdrawals
– big EOF implementation
– warm coinbase
– push0
– limit and meter initcode
– time based EL forking
– getpayloadV2 and getpayloadbodiesbyrange— Christine Kim (@christine_dkim) December 8, 2022
ETH withdrawal from staking and contracts remains a sensitive issue. Project representatives have recently caused a controversy in the community for not providing clarity on this issue. So, the rigidity of staking withdrawals is not accidental.
The second most important addition to Ethereum will be the implementation of the Ethereum Object Format. The new feature will enable code validation during contract creation. This will allow code versioning without an additional version field in the account. Technically, EOF is a new container format for EVM bytecode with one-time validation at deployment time.
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