Ethereum’s Shanghai hard fork has a tentative deadline of March 2023, according to discussion at the 151st Ethereum Core Developers Meeting on December 8. The Ethereum Improvement Protocol (EIP) 4844 upgrade, which will bring proto-danksharding to the network, is another goal of developers, who hope to launch it in May or June 2023.
Staked Ether (stETH) is currently locked on the Ethereum Beacon Chain despite the completion of the eagerly awaited proof-of-stake Merge upgrade on September 15. Nearly 3.5 million stETH ($4.48 billion) of the token, which is created by the decentralised finance protocol Lido, are in use today. As soon as the Shanghai upgrade is complete, stETH users will be able to withdraw their money along with any applicable staking rewards for validating network transactions. The upgrades were planned, according to the Ethereum Foundation. The Ethereum Foundation said that it structured the upgrades in this manner to “simplify and maximize focus on a successful transition to proof-of-stake.”
The EIP-4844 upgrade is intended to introduce a new data-blob-transaction prototype that was previously created by developers on February 21, 2022, following the hard fork. Optimistic Rollups, a layer-2 technology, allows Ethereum computation and network storage to be moved off-chain, increasing scalability by 10x to 100x. The capacity of rollups is expected to increase by up to 100x with the introduction of large portable bundles that can contain cheaper data in Ethereum transactions. While the upgrade will reduce transaction costs for layer-2 solutions, it will have no impact on the cost of Ethereum gas.
In December of last year, Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, stated that his ultimate goal was for the blockchain to serve as a basic foundation and for users to feel “fully comfortable storing their assets in a ZK [zero knowledge]-rollup running a full EVM [Ethereum Virtual Machine].” In addition, Buterin cautioned that sharding and data availability sampling are “complex technologies” and that their implementation would require years of audits and improvement.