During the 151st Ethereum Core Developers Meeting, core programmers have set a tentative deadline of March 2023 to begin Stake Ether withdrawals via Ethereum’s Shanghai Hard Fork launch.
Moreover, developers aim to launch the Ethereum Improvement Protocol (EIP) 4844 upgrade by May or June 2023 and this will introduce proto-danksharding to the network.
Though the revolutionary proof-of-stake Merge upgrade successfully went live on Sep. 15, Staked Ether (stETH) is currently locked on the Ethereum Beacon Chain. After the Shanghai upgrade, stETH users can withdraw their funds along with any applicable staking rewards for validating network transactions.
After the hard fork, the EIP-4844 upgrade is aligned which will introduce a new data-blob transaction prototype. At present, layer-2 technologies such as Optimistic Rollups can move Ethereum computation and network storage off-chain to improve scalability by 10x to 100x.
Developers expect that introducing large portable bundles that contain cheap data in Ethereum transactions can improve the capacity of rollups by up to 100x. Though the upgrade will lower transaction fees on a layer-2 solution, the Ethereum gas fee will remain unaffected.
The Ethereum Foundation said that it scheduled the upgrades in this manner to simply and maximize focus on a successful transition to proof-of-stake.
