The target date for the much-anticipated Ethereum Shanghai hard fork has now been confirmed: April 12. The target deadline was approved by the Ethereum core developers at the all core developers executive layer #157 call on March 16th.
The Shanghai mainnet upgrade contains five Ethereum improvement proposals, including EIP-4985, which will enable staked Ether Withdrawals on the Beacon Chain complete Ethereum’s transition from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus.
The target date April 12th at 10:27:35 PM UTC, Epoch 620, 9536 will now be confirmed by the developers on GitHub. The fork was originally expected to take place in March, but developers later pushed it back to early April. Validators will automatically receive regular reward payments in the withdrawal address. Additionally, stakers can exit positions completely, recovering their entire balance.
According to data from Etherscan, the Ethereum PoS smart contract has attracted more than 17.6 million ETH, worth nearly $29.4 billion at the time of publication. As Cointelegraph reported, analysts predict that the upgrade could trigger a sell-off in the short term.
The transition to PoS officially began on September 15, 2022, and the merger is a major milestone for Ethereum, replacing miners with validators and making ETH collateral a key component of the network. Ethereum’s roadmap has had several updates since Shanghai, including “Surge,” “Verge,” “Purge,” and “Splurge.”
Moving to PoS consensus could have regulatory implications for ETH and the crypto space. In September 2022, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler stated that the transformation of the blockchain may bring ETH to the attention of regulators.
Following the recent crackdown on crypto firms offering staking services in the U.S., Gensler suggested again on March 15 that proof-of-stake coins could be securities: "Whatever they're promoting and putting it into the protocol and locking their tokens in the protocol, a protocol that's usually developed by a small group of entrepreneurs and developers, I'm just suggesting that these token operators Every seeks compliance, and the same goes for intermediaries.”
