On Thursday, November 24, Ethereum’s top developers gathered to discuss the future of the protocol. In total, eight so-called Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) were discussed for the next upgrade that lives under the name “Shanghai”.
Finally withdraw funds
In any case, the developers agree that the Shanghai upgrade should make it possible to withdraw funds from the staking pool. Currently, it is not possible to release funds that are in the Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism. They are still stuck until this update. For this reason, many people cannot access their Ethereum for an unforeseeable time.
Furthermore, there are some upgrades to improve scalability and others that should take the Ethereum Virtual Machine to the next level. There is no consensus yet on when exactly the Shanghai upgrade should take place. After the Merge, the Ethereum Foundation indicated a time frame of 6 to 12 months, but that has been slowly changing lately.
Some developers want to incorporate the ability to include Staked Ethereum into the protocol as soon as possible. They want to launch the Shanghai upgrade with a few small extras in March 2023. Others think that more should be included in the upgrade and are aiming more for the fall of 2023. That would mean that your Ethereum will be stuck in the consensus mechanism for about 1 more year.
Other improvements
Another major improvement to the network lives under the name EIP 4844 and is also known as proto-thank hardening. This is the first significant step the protocol would make towards a more scalable network. The idea of sharding is to split the network into different “shards” as a way to boost scalability and lower gas fees.
A shard is simply a ‘piece’ or ‘chunk’ of the network. People running a node then no longer validate and verify the entire network, but only the shard(s) that are of interest to them. In theory, this makes it possible to make the network a lot larger and to process more transactions per second.
