The first hard fork of 2023 is getting closer in the crypto industry. Ethereum’s New Testnet news has brought the attention to upcoming Ethereum’s Zhejiang hard fork. Read about it here.
Parithosh Jayanthi, the Ethereum Foundation developer made a post on 31 January announcing the new launch of the “Zhejiang” public withdrawal testnet on 1 Feb at 3:00 pm UTC (8:30 pm IST). This will be the first testnet after the shifting of Ethereum from the PoW consensus mechanism to the PoS one. 6 days later the Shanghai and Capella testnets will also be triggered at epoch 1350.
Jayanthi stated that: –
“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”
After the Merge upgrade, Zhejiang will be the first public testnet to open, said by a fellow Ethereum engineer named Barnabas Busa. The complete withdrawal source code has been made available on the Ethereum website even though it is currently in development.
What To Expect From Ethereum’s New Testnet?
The Shanghai hard fork is supposed to be happening in March 2023. The users won’t be able to participate in the mock withdrawals right away until the testnet is upgraded on February 7. Users will initially be allowed to deposit ETH to testnet validators and then withdraw it the following week.
When the Shanghai update is completely operational, users will be able to withdraw their staked Ether rewards. Users have been able to stake their ETH on the proof-of-stake network since the Ethereum Merge update was successful in September 2022. But the funds were still restricted pending a fresh patch. The Shanghai upgrade will also include all Ethereum Improvement Protocols (EIPs), such as timestamp-based forking, which will be available on the future Zhejiang testnet.
The following upgrade after Shanghai is EIP-4844, scheduled for release in May or June of this year. According to experts, EIP-4844 has the potential to 100x increase the scalability of layer-2 rollups on Ethereum and decrease transaction costs.
Following the forks, all validator addresses with a 0x01 execution address on all clients will immediately initiate partial withdrawals. Some programs can be used to convert legacy BLS credentials (0x00) to execution addresses. Once full or partial withdrawals have been completed, validators can leave the testnet.
Zhejiang testnet Coming After The Disapproval Of Shandong Testnet
Following the deprecation of the Shandong testnet by the Ethereum developers, the Zhejiang testnet has now been launched. That’s because Shandong had a few EIPs pertaining to EVM Object Format (EOF), which was dropped from the Shanghai update. The upgrade for EOF will instead be a part of a different Ethereum hard fork anticipated in the third quarter.
To activate the Ethereum validator software, aspirant validators could lock 32 ETH in a staking contract on Ethereum’s Beacon chain. They would receive a yield on their ETH in exchange. Those who were unable to stake 32 ETH might lock up smaller amounts of ETH in liquid staking pools in exchange for a liquidity token. This could have the same value as ETH and could be used in other decentralized finance applications.
Ethereum developers will focus on the EIP-4844 update after the Shanghai upgrade. This will happen in May or June of this year following the Shanghai upgrade. The EIP-4844 improvement intends to reduce transaction fees along with increasing the scalability by more than 100 times.
Final Thoughts
Ethereum has been seen making continuous upgrades and seeing the competition from other cryptos like Polygon makes it look fair. 2022 can be known as the year of Polygon has it saw so much growth but the achievements of Ethereum aren’t much behind it. Now its time to see what Ethereum is planning for this year after the last hard fork of shifting from PoW to PoS chain.
For more content related to “Ethereum’s New Testnet Is Going Live On 1 February ” check out Suncrypto Academy.
Disclaimer: Crypto products and NFTs are unregulated and can be highly risky. There may be no regulatory recourse for any loss from such transactions. All content provided is for informational purposes only, and shall not be relied upon as financial/investment advice. Opinions shared, if any, are only shared for information and education purposes. Although the best efforts have been made to ensure all information is accurate and up to date. Occasionally unintended errors or misprints may occur. We recommend you to please do your own research or consult an expert before making any investment decision. You may write to us at [email protected].
