Ethereum core devs confirm April 12 date for Shapella upgrade

The Shapella network upgrade will be activated on the Ethereum mainnet on April 12, following an official consensus reached by core developers.

The Shapella upgrade will happen at network epoch 194,048, according to a blog post by the Ethereum Foundation on Tuesday. An epoch in Ethereum is a bundle of 32 blocks on the network and this epoch is expected to happen at 6:27 pm EDT on April 12. Tuesday’s statement confirms previous estimates for the upgrade.

Shapella is a portmanteau of Shanghai and Capella. These are two network upgrades that will happen simultaneously. The Shanghai upgrade is for the consensus layer and Capella is for the execution layer.

The Shapella upgrade as a whole will introduce EIP-4895 to the Ethereum network. This EIP will enable the withdrawal of staked ether for the first time ever. Shapella also has other network improvements aimed at optimizing transaction fees for certain activities. These upgrades have been tested on multiple testnets.

Tuesday’s upgrade confirmation also stated that the bug bounty program for Shapella vulnerabilities will run until April 5. The Ethereum Foundation recently doubled the bug bounty reward to $500,000.

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