Ethereum to enable withdrawal of staked ETH in a few days

The Ethereum network has been on a series of upgrades on its execution and consensus layer. Moving from proof of work to proof of stake via the launch of the Beacon Chain and its subsequent merging with the mainnet in September, 2022.

Following the transition to the Proof of Stake mechanism, users are able to stake ETH to secure the network; however, staked Ethereum (ETH) could be withdrawn and rewards couldn’t be distributed until now. 

The next upgrade following the merge is the Shanghai and Capella upgrades targeted at improving the execution and consensus layer of the network, respectively. Ethereum announced that the Shanghai and Capella upgrades will go live simultaneously on Apr-12-2023. 

Despite acting on different layers of the network, both upgrades have the same result which is to enable the withdrawal of staked ETH.

Capella is the third significant upgrade to the consensus layer and would do two major things, allowing blocks to process withdrawal requests and an account sweeping function that checks validator accounts for available rewards.

After the upgrade, withdrawal requests made immediately are likely to take weeks to months to process. Exchanges and protocols allowing the stake of Ethereum will enable withdrawals at varying dates, weeks, and months after the upgrade. Validators who participate directly in on-chain staking will take a more manual process.

The Shanghai and Capella (Shapella) launch is speculated to cause some volatility in the market as more withdrawals are likely to occur, however, would stabilize after some time. 

Ethereum, despite its popularity, is plagued with scalability issues and high gas fees. Hence, the network is making moves to maintain a more decentralized, secure and low fee network that can effortlessly scale.

Read also; Lightning Network is coming to Coinbase 

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