Last week, Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko announced a new date for the Shapella network upgrade. Since then, the community has been eagerly awaiting for the same to transpire. On Tuesday, Feb. 28, the network upgrade was initiated at epoch 56832 at 4:04 UTC. By 4:17 UTC, it was finalized.
Members of the community took to Twitter to confirm the development. The team lead at Nethermind, an Ethereum and StarkNet research and engineering company tweeted,
“Sepolia Shapella has been successfully activated.”
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Paritosh Jayanthi, DevOps at the Ethereum Foundation, affirmed that the latest upgrade has brought the network a step closer to its Shanghai upgrade. After one more testnet execution on Goerli, the mainnet upgrade will take place.
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The path to Ethereum’s Shanghai upgrade
At the beginning of the month, Ethereum’s Zhejiang testnet successfully replicated staked ETH withdrawals for the first time. The accomplishment brought the network closer to its historic conversion to a fully functional proof-of-stake network.
The Sepolia testnet marks the second dress rehearsal, simulating the Shanghai hard fork. The Sepolia Shapella upgrade was executed on a closed testnet where only core developers run the validators.
In terms of validator participation, Sepolia is the smallest of all the three testnets. Contrarily, Goerli will be the biggest testnet, and it is a proper representation of Ethereum’s blockchain. Thus, the latter upgrade is the most crucial one and the final dress rehearsal will take place on Goerli in the coming weeks.
Once it is successfully executed, developers will prepare for the final Shanghai hard fork on the mainnet that will finally foster the withdrawals of staked Ether tokens.
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