The release date of the public testnet for the Ethereum Shanghai upgrade has been alluded to happen by the February end, according to Christine Kim, a Galaxy research associate.
In the most recent All Core Developers (ACD) call of 2023, Kim noted that in order to make sure that developers can reach the March deadline, they want to release a public test network for the Shanghai update by the end of February.
Last month, it was announced that Ethereum devs were targeting March 2023 for staked ETH withdrawals. Staked Ether (stETH) is now locked on the Ethereum Beacon Chain. Users will only be allowed to withdraw funds and any related staking incentives for validating network transactions after the Shanghai upgrade.
At the meeting, core developers decided against adding Ethereum Virtual Machine Object Format (EOF), a suggested upgrade to the blockchain’s EVM programming environment, since they were worried it might cause Shanghai to be delayed.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated “In the EVM it’s much hard to remove things than it is to remove other features. You have applications that are written in EVM code and if the EVM changes, then those applications can’t change.”
In response, software developer lightclient acknowledged that EVMs inclusion in Shanghai will cause the upgrade to be delayed by around a month depending on the results of EOF testing over the Christmas break.
Lightclient at the meeting remarked, “If we’re trying to do mainnet testnet upgrades in the beginning of February, I don’t think we’ll be ready by then.”
The Ethereum Foundation’s DevOps Engineer Barnabus Busa provided an update on the testing of staked ETH withdrawals. According to him, the Shanghai developer test network, which was recently released before Christmas, has already advanced to block 4,000.
Also Read: What’s Next After the Ethereum Merge?
