Ethereum's Shapella Upgrade Unleashes $222 Million in Unstaked $ETH

Over $222 million worth of the second-largest digital asset by market capitalization, Ethereum ($ETH) have been unstaked on the network since the widely-anticipated Shapella upgrade introduced these withdrawals less than 24 hours ago.

According to data shared by blockchain monitoring resource Lookonchain, 111,378 ETH were quickly unstaken shortly after the upgrade, with liquid staking service Lido Finance accounting for 57.2% of all withdrawals after seeing 63,695 ETH move off of its service.

Per Lookonchain, over 19,19 million ETH, worth over $38 billion, are staked on the network, and over 1 million ETH have been generated in rewards since staking went live on the Beacon chain. The average price of ETH staked, the service notes, is $1,964.

The Shapella upgrade went live on April 12, and implemented with it Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 4895, which allows for the withdrawal of staked Ether (ETH). Along with the withdrawal mechanism, Shapella improved the network’s gas fees for some transactions, as the core team had explained on GitHub before.

The upgrade completes Ethereum’s transition to a Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism and is widely expected to produce short-term price fluctuations as some of the staked Ether is withdrawn. Not all of the 18 million staked ETH will be available for withdrawal all at once due to limits on the amount that can be withdrawn.

With the Shapella upgrade, staked ETH can be withdrawn in two ways: partial and full. Partial withdrawals keep the validators running by automatically distributing the ETH to them, so they have the required 32 ETH balance. Full withdrawals stop the validator and take out the whole staked amount. Only around 3.5% of validators moved to a full withdrawal.

The upgrade was widely expected to negatively affect the price of ETH as staked moved to withdraw funds that had been previously locked. Instead, data shows the cryptocurrency’s price surged to, at the time of writing, test the $2,000 mark after rising 4.5% in the last 24-hour period.

Ethereum may have surged as investors who were previously on the sidelines move into the cryptocurrency, as they can now stake their tokens to earn validator rewards without having to lock up their funds for an undetermined amount of time.

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