Ethereum Takes Step Closer To Shanghai With Deployment On Goerli Testnet

Ethereum is another step closer to its next major upgrade, dubbed Shanghai.

The final dress rehearsal for Ethereum’s upcoming Shanghai-Capella upgrade, simply Shapella, has occurred on the Goerli test network environment (testnet). The test on Goerli was highly anticipated because its the largest public Ethereum testnet and the last opportunity for staking providers to ensure that staked ETH is withdrawable before Shanghai arrives on the mainnet blockchain.

Ethereum Sees Successful Deployment Of Shanghai On Goerli

The Shapella upgrade was activated at epoch 162304 at 10:26 a.m. UTC on March 14. This specific test run simulated one of the key Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), withdrawing staked Ethereum from the blockchain.

After testing the upgrade on Goerli, developers plan to launch it on the Ethereum mainnet sometime next month, marking the next major milestone after the network’s shift from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to a PoS security model in September 2022. This will, however, be a slight delay from the original timeline that Ethereum developers set for March.

It’s worth mentioning that the simulation on the Goerli testnet didn’t go smoothly. Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko posited that although deposits were being processed, they encountered some issues because a handful of testnet validators failed to upgrade their client software before the Shapella hard fork was executed on Goerli.

Beiko highlighted that testnet validators had less incentive “to initiate the upgrade as Goerli ETH is “worthless”. Nonetheless, he expects them to make the necessary adjustments ahead of the mainnet launch.

Arbitrum developer “terence.eth” similarly explained that it took 15 epochs for the Goerli testnet to go through Shapella because of low validator participation rates. There was a 29% validator participation rate at the time that the epoch was triggered, which is below the two-thirds threshold.

“There was nothing wrong with the client software. We just had to get the offline operators to upgrade. It was a good stress test. On to the next one. Mainnet,” terence.eth summarized.

Prior to Goerli, the Ethereum developers executed numerous phases of public testing for Shapella on the Sepolia and Zhejiang public testnets since February. After the Goerli test, all that is left is for developers to set the exact date for the fork on the mainnet.

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