Withdrawals of staked ETH will start in the spring, while “proto-danksharding” will come in the fall’s hard fork. Ethereum Developers network decided on Thursday that the “Shanghai” hard fork’s intended deployment date will be in March 2023. This version will add the EIP 4895 code, which will permit withdrawals of staked ether (ETH) from the Beacon Chain.
The development of the “EVM Object Format” (EOF), a group of EIPs that effectively update the Ethereum Virtual Machine, the setting in which Ethereum is able to execute smart contracts, was also agreed upon by developers to be addressed in Shanghai. The EIPs in question are EIP 3540, EIP 3670, EIP 4200, EIP 4570, and EIP 5450.
Developers agreed to postpone EOF until the fall in order to avoid delaying staked ETH withdrawals if EOF appears to be too difficult to achieve by the next All Core Developers call scheduled for January 5.
Additionally, developers agreed to a second hard fork that would solve proto-danksharding, also known as EIP 4844, probably in the fall of 2023. Through sharding, a technique that divides the network into “shards” to enhance its capacity and lower gas prices, EIP 4844 would make Ethereum more scalable.
