It looks like we will get the Shanghai upgrade for Ethereum in March 2023. This makes it possible, among other things, to withdraw Staked Ethereum. So far that is not possible and strikers still have to wait until this upgrade to release their Ethers.
EIP-4884: proto thanks hardening
The new Shanghai upgrade does not include EIP-4884. The abbreviation EIP stands for Ethereum Improvement Proposal, an improvement proposal for Ethereum. This particular EIP brings “proto-thank hardening” to Ethereum. Proto-thank hardening is an important advancement in Layer 2 rollup scalability (The Surge) leading up to the major sharding upgrade at the end of next year.
Sharding is splitting the blockchain into parts, so that everyone no longer has to verify everything. However, the ultimate consensus for the Shanghai upgrade is to keep the focus on including Staked Ethereum. There are also a few minor upgrades in Shanghai for the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
In addition, there is also a small set of EIPs that roll out next to Shanghai. These include EIP-3651: Warm Coinbase, EIP-3855: PUSH0 instruction, EIP-3860: Limit and meter initcode, and EIP-4895: Beacon chain push withdrawals as operations.
Focus on pre-strike shots
The focus for the upgrade is logically on the withdrawal of Ethers by people who strike. At the time of writing this is not yet possible. If the upgrade comes in March 2023, it would be about 6 months after the Merge. That is what the developers initially promised and now seem to deliver.
There has been some criticism of Ethereum that a small group of people can control when others can take their stake. Somehow it is also strange that that code was not directly included in the Proof-of-Stake protocol. It seems that they were trying to push the price up a bit. Which might have worked in a bull market, but it’s difficult in these circumstances.
