After the Zhejiang testnet went live in early February, the Shanghai upgrade of the Ethereum (ETH) network on the Sepolia testnet has been officially scheduled for the end of the month and is expected to have an impact on the price of the protocol’s native cryptocurrency before the long-awaited mainnet launch.
As it happens, the Shanghai/Capella upgrade, also called ‘Shapella,’ is set for deployment on the Ethereum testnet Sepolia network at epoch 56832, which is scheduled for 4:04:48 AM UTC on February 28, the core blockchain development team said in a blog post on February 21.
What does this mean?
According to the team, this means that “withdrawals are coming (…) after months of testing and an ephemeral devnet launch,” as the upgrade combines the execution and consensus layers. Specifically:
“This upgrade follows The Merge and enables validators to withdraw their stake from the Beacon Chain back to the execution layer. It also introduces new functionality to both the execution and consensus layer.”
The execution layer – Shanghai – introduces warm Coinbase, PUSH0 instruction, limit and meter initcode, deprecate SELFDESTRUCT, and Beacon chain push withdrawals as operations, while the consensus layer – Capella – enables full and partial withdrawals for validators, as well as introducing independent state and block historical accumulators and a prerequisite for withdrawals.
Meanwhile, this is the second public testnet launch before the Shanghai hard fork goes live on the mainnet after the prior stress tests on Zhejiang revealed some minor bugs that have since been addressed and will not affect the timeline for further updates.
Notably, the Shapella upgrade arrives a little later than expected, as the platform’s developer Barnabas Busa previously announced it would be implemented six days after the Zhejiang public staking testnet, which took place on February 1, as Finbold reported.
Ethereum price analysis
As things stand, Ethereum is at press time changing hands at the price of $1,644, down 1.9% in the last 24 hours but still recording increases of 5.62% over the previous week, as well as being up 0.84% on its monthly chart, according to the data retrieved on February 22.
Considering that the price of Ethereum had soared immediately after the Zhejiang testnet was triggered, upward price action can be expected upon the launch of the Shapella testnet as well. However, the continuation of a bullish rally will depend on further developments on the blockchain, as well as on the wider crypto and macro scene.
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