Ethereum is one of the most popular and largest cryptocurrencies in the space after Bitcoin. It promises to bring new and revolutionary ideas into the industry and is constantly bringing new ideas to the table.
On 31st January 2023, Parithosh Jayanthi, the developer of the Ethereum Foundation released a post. The post stated that on 1st February 2023 at 15:00 UTC, the “Zhejiang” public withdrawal testnet will be launched.
A public withdrawal testnet is a testing network for a blockchain or cryptocurrency system, which is open to the public and used to test the withdrawal process of tokens or coins from the network. The purpose of a public withdrawal testnet is to simulate real-world conditions and ensure that the withdrawal process is secure, reliable and efficient. This is typically done before the launch of a mainnet, to catch any potential issues and ensure a smooth user experience.
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Six days after this launch of Zhejiang, what will follow will be the start of the Shanghai and Capella testnets as well at epoch 1350. According to the official information provided by the Ethereum Team, “Shanghai and Capella are the names of the upcoming Ethereum hard fork. The included EIPs can be found here. One of the major new features is the enabling of Withdrawal of validators from the Ethereum beacon chain. Shanghai is the name of the fork on the execution client side, and Capella is the upgrade name on the consensus layer client side.”
This is what Paritosh Jayanthi had to add about the launch
“This is also a great opportunity for all tools to test out how they want to collect, display and use the withdrawal information. You can attempt to convert 0x00 credentials to 0x01 and set a withdrawal address. You can test partial withdrawals and full withdrawals by exiting your validator.”
The Shanghai upgrade, when it becomes fully functional, will give users the capability to access their staked Ether assets and their corresponding rewards. Following the successful Ethereum Merge upgrade in September 202, users have been able to stake their ETH in the proof-of-stake network. Nevertheless, their funds are currently locked and are awaiting a new update.
Another Ethereum developer Barnabas Busa took to Twitter to talk more about this launch. He said that post the Merge update, this is in fact the very first public testament to be launched. Even though the project is still in its beta stage, you can find the source code published on the official website of Ethereum.
The next step in the development plan after Shanghai is the release of EIP-4844, which is estimated to occur in either May or June of 2023. Industry specialists believe that EIP-4844 has the potential to greatly enhance the scalability of layer-2 rollups on Ethereum by a factor of 100 times, as well as reducing transaction fees. He also added that if any user has questions regarding the launch, they can move to the ethstaker discord server and search for the “zhejiang” channel for more information.