In a recent post, ETH core developer Tim Beiko revealed that after months of testing and a short devnet launch, the Shapella network upgrade will be activated on the Sepolia network at epoch 56832 on February 28.
Shapella essentially refers to two upgrades of Ethereum - "Shanghai" and "Capella". This upgrade will realize the withdrawal of Ethereum in the execution layer, and upgrade the consensus layer of the Beacon chain at the same time.
New features will also be introduced into the execution and consensus layers. Changes at the executive level include:
- EIP-3651: Warm COINBASE
- EIP-3855: PUSH0 Instruction
- EIP-3860: Throttling and metering initialization code
- EIP-4895: Beacon chain push withdrawal operations
- EIP-6049: Deprecate SELFDESTRUCT
On the other hand, the changes to the consensus layer for the Capella upgrade include full and partial withdrawals of validators. The original single history root will be replaced by a separate state and block history accumulator. Ethereum users or ETH holders do not have to upgrade unless told to take additional steps.
Non-staking node operators, on the other hand, must upgrade their nodes to the Ethereum client version for the Sepolia upgrade. The same goes for stakers. If stakers or node operators fail to update to the latest version, their clients will sync to the pre-forked blockchain after the upgrade. As such, they would be stuck on an incompatible chain per the old rules, unable to send ETH tokens or operate on a post-Shapella Sepolia network.
The latest development comes a week after concerns surfaced about a possible delay in the Shanghai upgrade due to the detection of a vulnerability in the public test network Shapella.
However, the developer confirmed that the issue can be fixed with a patch.
