Sepolia Shapella upgrade date confirmed by Ethereum Devs, bringing the Shanghai Upgrade closer than ever!

The journey of the biggest altcoin according to market cap, Ethereum, has been phenomenal since 2022. With a delay in its upgrade for 2 years, the Ethereum Blockchain finally executed their upgrade to work with a Proof of Stake consensus mechanism. Ever since the historic event took place on September 15, 2022, the Ethereum developers have been focusing on the next upgrade that is to be executed from the vast plan that Ethereum founder, Vitalik Buterin, have in mind.

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.@VitalikButerin claims that #Ethereum will be able to to process “100,000 transactions per second”, following the completion of 5 key phases:

• The Merge
• The Surge
• The Verge
• The Purge
• The Splurge

A quick breakdown of what each stage means for $ETH. 👇 pic.twitter.com/FnaWww8mHZ

— Miles Deutscher (@milesdeutscher) July 22, 2022

So now, the blockchain in moving towards The Surge, with the Shanghai upgrade being the next in line for execution.

What is The Surge?

The Surge is referred to as the step in the Ethereum masterplan which intends to make Ethereum far more scalable than it ever was before. Here, a concept called ‘sharding’ is going to be implemented.

Sharding is a process which would split Ethereum’s entire network into smaller pieces, also known as ‘shards’ which according to the plan will drastically increase the network’s scalability. This is done by breaking up the data that is being processed by the Ethereum mainnet into 64 smaller segments. It’s like splitting Ethereum’s single broad highway into 64 smaller individual highways so that traffic can be managed better. This could only be done when it is on Proof-of-stake consensus mechanism and hence the Ethereum Merge came first.

Shanghai Upgrade on Sepolia Testnet

With the process being laid out, the Ethereum developers have been playing out the upgrades on various testnets to make sure that the transition happens smoothly. Similar to how the Merge had 3 testnets before execution, the Shanghai upgrade is also being out through one of the same testnet. The most important part, it now has an official date for execution. 

However, the Sepolia testnet will be the second public testnet that has deployed this upgrade. Earlier in February, another testnet, the Zhejiang testnet, has also deployed this upgrade. As per the announcement, this launch of the Shanghai-Capella upgrade on the Sepolia test network has been set for February 28 at epoch 56832. 

The Shanghai-Capella upgrade, which is also referred to as Shapella, is an upgrade that is aiming to enable ether (ETH) withdrawals from network validators. This is one of the features that the crypto community was looking forward to but it was not enabled during Ethereum’s transition to Proof of Stake consensus, called The Merge.

Read On: Ethereum Shanghai Upgrade Scheduled

As per the announcement, some of the other features that the Capella upgrade will enable, are:

• Full and partial withdrawals for validators
• BLSToExecutionChange messages, which allow validators using a BLS_WITHDRAWAL_PREFIX to update it to an ETH1_ADDRESS_WITHDRAWAL_PREFIX, a prerequisite for withdrawals
• Independent state and block historical accumulators, replacing the original singular historical roots

Did You Know? This Shapella upgrade combines changes to two layers; the execution layer and the consensus layer. Shanghai will be upgrading the execution layer of Ethereum, while Capella will be upgrading the consensus layer of the blockchain.