important point
- Ethereum was upgraded late last night in Shanghai.
- The network now allows validators to withdraw staked ETH.
- About 17.4 million ETH is currently staked.
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The long-awaited Shanghai upgrade is now live on Ethereum. This means that a validator is free to withdraw her staked ETH from the network.
Ethereum historical moment
Ethereum reached another milestone last night.
The Ethereum network performed its long-awaited Shanghai upgrade on Wednesday the 12th. The hard fork was triggered at 22:27 UTC when the blockchain reached block height 6209536 and was completed around 22:42 UTC.
ethereum last year migrated From Proof-of-Work consensus mechanisms to Proof-of-Stake, an event known in the cryptocurrency community as Merge. In Proof-of-Work, miners earn the right to generate blocks by solving very complex equations, which requires enormous computational power. Proof-of-Stake, on the other hand, allows a validator to obtain the same privileges by simply locking her 32 ETH in the network.
Ethereum successfully completed the merge on Sept. 15, but the team wanted to ensure the network was stable after the merge before enabling staking outflows, so validators were forced to invest in staked ETH. could not be pulled out. Last night’s upgrade finally allowed validators to stake or unstake funds. So, Ethereum’s move to Proof-of-Stake is officially complete.
according to token unlock, there is currently 17.4 million ETH (worth approximately $34.7 billion) staked on the Ethereum network, representing approximately 15.4% of the total ETH supply. There are currently approximately 902,860 ETH ($1.8 billion) pending withdrawals. Despite the amount of ETH that could flood the market at short notice, ETH itself rose 4.33% on the day and is trading around $2,000. This is a price not seen since August 2022.
“We are at a stage where the hardest and fastest part of the Ethereum protocol transition is basically over,” said Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin during the event livestream. “The very important things still need to be done, but those very important things can be safely done at a slower pace.”
Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this work owned BTC, ETH, and several other crypto assets.