ViaBTC | As the Shapella Upgrade Approaches, Sepolia and Goerli Testnets Are Included in the Deployment Plan
On December 15, 2022, Ethereum developers gathered for their 100th Consensus Layer (CL) call, during which the CL team discussed the preparations for Capella, the next major upgrade of the Beacon Chain. The Capella upgrade will be activated simultaneously with the Shanghai upgrade, which will happen on the Execution Layer (EL). Therefore, the updates from the Shanghai upgrade will not be limited to the Execution Layer, and the two upgrades are now collectively referred to as Shapella (Shanghai+Capella).
The Latest Progress of the Shapella Upgrade
In early February, Ethereum announced exciting news: Zhejiang, Ethereum’s first public withdrawals testnet, was launched on February 1 to prepare for the Shapella upgrade. On February 7, upon reaching the target height of Epoch 1350, the testnet was successfully activated, simulating the withdrawal of staked ETH for the first time. Before the Shapella upgrade is officially activated on the Ethereum mainnet, deployment tests will be conducted on Sepolia and Goerli testnets to help developers identify potential problems in advance.
It has been rumored that “Ethereum developers agreed on Feb. 28 as the target date for activating the Shanghai upgrade on Sepolia testnet, which is the second to last public testnet before the mainnet upgrade” on the 102nd Ethereum All Core Developers Call (ACDC) conference call. The news was later confirmed by Tim Beiko, an Ethereum core developer. This means that if everything goes as planned, the Goerli testnet upgrade will be the last “rehearsal” before the upgrade is activated on the mainnet in late March or early April.
Ethereum’s Plan for the Sepolia Testnet
Since the activation of the Zhejiang testnet on February 7, many investors have withdrawn ETH on the testnet after receiving tokens from the faucet. However, don’t expect to do the same on the Sepolia testnet since it is a restricted testnet only for Ethereum developers and will block unrelated developers running validators on the network.
By then, a hard fork will be implemented on the Sepolia testnet, which will switch nodes from the current version of the Ethereum protocol to an upgraded version. Ethereum developers will wait on the results of the Sepolia testnet (the withdrawal test for the second round of ETH staking) and the parallel testing efforts of MEV-Boost related software to decide on the activation date of the Goerli testnet and the Ethereum mainnet based on the test performance.
The Significance of the Goerli Testnet
The Goerli testnet is not only the largest Ethereum public testnet but also the last testnet to activate the Shapella upgrade before it goes live on the mainnet. Naturally, Goerli has become the most anticipated testnet among Ethereum users. It should be noted that Goerli also played a key role as the last testnet to implement the Merge before the Ethereum mainnet.
Bullish Effect
As the Shapella upgrade approaches, the related tokens have surged. According to the “Ethereum Shanghai Upgrade” section on CoinEx’s Market webpage, we can tell that:
Lido DAO aims to offer an ETH 2.0 staking solution, and its token LDO soared by 8.90% in 24 hours;
Rocket Pool is an ETH 2.0 staking pool project, and its governance token RPL was up 7.09% in 24 hours;
Frax Share is a hybrid algorithm stablecoin on Ethereum that also provides staking services for ETH 2.0, and its token FXS surged by 14.40% in 24 hours;
In addition, tokens related to Ethereum staking such as SSV and ANKR have all recorded 24H growth rates of over 10%.
According to Staking Rewards, a blockchain analysis platform, of the top ten PoS chains, except for Ethereum, which just switched from PoW to PoS last year, the staking ratio usually ranges from 40% to 98%. As of February 16, the market cap of staked ETH merely stood at $29.9 billion, 14.41% of the total market cap.
If the Shapella upgrade is successful, as staked ETH becomes available for withdrawals, the unleashed liquidity and stable APY will attract more crypto and even non-crypto institutions and whale players into ETH staking. It is no wonder that projects providing staking services for ETH 2.0 thrived over the recent period. Apart from investing in certain categories related to ETH staking, investors, institutions, as well as regular Ethereum users can now only wait for the smooth transition from the Sepolia and Goerli networks to the mainnet.
* Disclaimer: The article is for reference only and offers no financial advice.
