On February 28, Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko announced the upcoming Shapella network upgrade. Set to activate on the Sepolia network at epoch 56832, Shanghai and Capella (Shapella) are the names of this hard fork’s execution and consensus layers, respectively. Included in these changes are warm Coinbase (not to be confused with the crypto-exchange)—a game changer that reduces network fees for builders—and Beacon Chain push withdrawals, which will enable validators to transfer from the Beacon Chain to the Ethereum Virtual Machine via a new “system-level” operation type.
This upgrade has been highly anticipated by the Ethereum community and is expected to improve its current features and capabilities.
Coinbase is the software developers use to receive new tokens on Ethereum’s network. Every platform transaction requires multiple interactions with Coinbase, but this costs more initially as it needs time to “warm up.” However, with EIP-3651, Coinbase will remain warm from the start, requiring a lower gas fee to access it. Other changes to the consensus layer include full and partial withdrawals for validators and an independent state and block historical accumulators that replace the original singular roots. This makes it possible for validators to withdraw their Ether rewards above 32 Ether while still maintaining validation or to exit and take all 32 Ether and rewards fully.
The Shapella upgrade is crucial to Ethereum’s success following the Merge. Moreover, it will enable validators to withdraw their staked Ether from the Beacon Chain to the execution layer and bring changes to both the execution and consensus layers for new features. All stakeholders and non-stakes must update their nodes to the most recent Ethereum client versions to take advantage of these new features. After Sepolia is deployed, the next step will be Shanghai’s release on the Goerli test network in March.
