After the successful transition through ‘The Merge’, the Ethereum Foundation announced the Shapella network upgrade on the Sepolia Testnet, which will take place on Feb. 28, 2023, at epoch 56832.
The Shapella upgrade combines changes to the Shanghai execution layer and the Capella consensus layers and the Engine API. The upgrade will restore the withdrawal access for validators and they will be able to stake their ETH from the Beacon Chain back to the execution layer.
Here note that this Shapella launch will be launched on the Sepolia testnet. After that, developers will launch Shapella on Goerli public testnet before the Shanghai upgrade rolls out on the Ethereum mainnet, which is slated for March 2023. After that developers will be able to test application functions without putting real ETH at risk.
Also Read: Ethereum Devs Deploys Shadow Fork for Shanghai Upgrade
Sepolia is the second-last testnet before the Shanghai upgrade on the Ethereum mainnet. The current Sepolia launch is only limited to selected validators, including consensus layer clients Lodestar, Nimbus, Prysm, and Teku, and execution layer implementations, Besu, Erigon, go-Ethereum, and Nethermind.
As Ethereum moved on the proof-of-stake consensus mechanism last year, the participant has to stake 32 ETH in the staking pool to participate on the network and validate transactions. By doing so they are also locking rewards. At the time of writing, more than 16 million ETH tokens are staked on the network from 512,657 validators. Once the Shanghai upgrade is done, the validators will be able to withdraw their tokens.
The upgrade will compel both stakers and non-staking node operators to update their nodes on the latest version of their respective below-layer tables.
If they fail to update their nodes at the latest version, their client will sync to the pre-fork blockchain on the completion of the upgrade.
