Ethereum core developer Tim Beliko says the date for the Shanghai upgrade will be set during the next meeting scheduled on March 16th.
Ethereum core developers delay the launch of the long-anticipated Shanghai upgrade to April.
The news was revealed during the Ethereum developer meeting on March 2nd. In the meeting, developers agreed to postpone the launch of the Shanghai hard fork by approximately two weeks, as the Goerli testnet should launch first.
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The final testnet for the Shanghai upgrade, Goerli, is scheduled for March 14th. During the testnet, staking providers will ensure that staked Ether (stETH) is withdrawable and that the hard fork can move forward.
During the meeting, Tim Beliko, Ethereum core developer and project coordinator, stated:
For mainnet, we usually want to give people at least two weeks after the announcement. <...> So imagine Goerli happens on the 14th, everything goes well, on the 16th, we agree to move forward with mainnet — I think the earliest that puts us is like the first week of April.
Shortly after the meeting, Beliko took to Twitter to share additional information about developer plans. The Ethereum project coordinator revealed that developers haven't agreed on a “mainnet date explicitly.” However, Beliko said the team expects to set the date during the next meeting on March 16th.
Shanghai mainnet hard fork will be the first major upgrade applied to the Ethereum network after the “Merge.” The new upgrade will allow customers to withdraw staked Ether (stETH) from the Beacon Chain “back to the execution layer.”
It is worth noting that during the first months of 2023, the Ethereum core developers have been actively working on getting closer to the Shanghai mainnet upgrade. At the end of January, developers launched Shanghai mainnet shadow fork. “Withdrawal-Mainnet-Shadow-Fork-1” was designed to test the capabilities and conditions needed to complete staked Ether (stETH) withdrawals.
In February, the team behind Ethereum (ETH) successfully completed two testnets, Zhejiang and Sepolia.
At the time of writing, there were over 17.1 million staked Ether on the Beacon Chain.
