Ethereum developers confirmed in a recent call that they will be rolling out the Shanghai upgrade without EIP 4844 to counter delays in enabling withdrawals for staked ETH.
EIP 4844 may cause delays
In the previous All Core Developers (ACD) report, developers claimed that enabling recordings was a top priority. However, they had yet to decide whether to roll out the upgrade with EIP 4844, the proto Dankharden proposal. However, the inclusion of EIP 4844 threatened to cause delays.
Danny Ryan noted that developers indicated that EIP 4844 was far from finished, contrary to the recordings. Therefore, to avoid significant delays, Ryan felt it made sense to proceed with the upgrade without EIP 4844.
“I think what was made clear by Consensus Layer teams is that they believe EIP 4844 is not yet in the same state of readiness as withdrawals. Linking them would significantly slow down recordings. That is why we will not continue that and will continue with Capella in its current form.”
— Said Ryan
Capella is the name of the testnet where developers test staked ETH withdrawals. Developers plan to roll out the proto-thanks hardening feature in a later upgrade.
Barnabas Busa, a DevOps engineer at the Ethereum Foundation, provided an update on the progress made in enabling staking recording. He noted that developers are currently running tests in two different environments. One test environment allows developers to test the feature in a pre-Merge Ethereum state and the other in a post-Merge state.
However, according to Busa, these networks are not yet ready to support all Execution Layer (EL) and Consensus Layer (CL) clients at this time.
While Ethereum developers assured users of ETH withdrawals within 6 to 12 months after the Merge, that is now not so certain. However, the latest developer statements may allow ETH strikers to withdraw their tokens as early as March.
The Ethereum staking contract currently holds about 15.56 million ETH worth about $19 billion, according to Etherscan data. It represents an increase of more than 200,000 ETH in the past 12 days.