Ethereum Developers Confirm Shanghai Upgrade Will Enable Staked ETH Withdrawals

Ethereum stakers will be able to withdraw staked ETH.

Ethereum developers, in a recent call, confirmed that they will roll out the Shanghai upgrade without EIP 4844 to eliminate delays in enabling withdrawals for staked ETH.

Ethereum developers, during the 99th Consensus Layer (CL) call held on December 1, have disclosed that they will be rolling out the Shanghai Upgrade without EIP 4844 to eliminate delays in Ethereum staking withdrawals, per a Galaxy Insights report.

Notably, the conclusions from the meeting confirm the previous report by The Crypto Basic, where developers expressed the belief that they could roll out staking withdrawals with the Shanghai upgrade in March. Furthermore, it clears any doubts about a significant delay.

Per the previous report from the All Core Developers (ACD) in November, developers had asserted that enabling staking withdrawals was a top priority. However, they still needed to decide whether to roll out the upgrade with EIP 4844, the proto-danksharding proposal. As highlighted, the inclusion of EIP 4844 risked causing delays.

Danny Ryan, who led the CL call, noted that developers indicated that EIP 4844 is nowhere near as ready as staking withdrawals. Consequently, to avoid significant delays, Ryan felt it only made sense to move ahead with the upgrade without EIP 4844.

“I think crucially what was made clear by Consensus Layer teams is that they believe that EIP 4844 is not nearly in the same readiness as [staked ETH] withdrawals and coupling them would significantly delay withdrawals,” Ryan said per the report. “We will not couple them. We will work full steam ahead on Capella in its current form.”

For context, Capella is the name of the testnet where developers are testing staked ETH withdrawals. Notably, developers plan to roll out the proto-danksharding feature in a later upgrade.

Giving an update on the progress made with enabling staking withdrawals, Barnabas Busa, a DevOps engineer at the Ethereum Foundation, noted that developers were currently carrying out tests in two different environments. Notably, one test environment allows developers to test the feature in a pre-Merge Ethereum state, while the other offers a post-Merge state.

However, according to Busa, at the moment, these networks are yet to support all Execution Layer (EL) and CL clients.

It bears mentioning that while Ethereum developers had assured users of staked ETH withdrawals in 6 to 12 months post-Merge, in recent weeks, the timeline has been shrouded in uncertainty. However, the latest statements from developers could see ETH stakers able 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 over 200k ETH in the last 12 days.

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