‘Withdrawals are coming!’ — Ethereum devs confirm epoch for Shapella fork

cointelegraph.com:

Ethereum validators will soon be able to withdraw their Ether (ETH) from the Beacon Chain, with the Shapella hard fork set to be activated on the Ethereum mainnet on April 12.

Shapella will take effect at epoch 194,048, which is scheduled for 10:27 pm UTC on April 12, Ethereum core developers confirmed.

The withdrawals will be enabled by Ethereum Improvement Proposal EIP-4895 by “pushing” staked Ether from the Beacon Chain to the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), otherwise known as the execution layer.

It's happening Shapella is scheduled on mainnet for epoch 194048, scheduled for 22:27:35 UTC on Apr. 12, 2023 Client releases compatible with the upgrade are listed in the announcement below https://t.co/I0hSv9lnjz

The epoch, slot, and time were confirmed following a week-long deliberation between members of the Ethereum Foundation, which was led by Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko.

While the hard fork will allow for partial and full withdrawals, several mechanisms are set in place to ensure a flood of Ether supply doesn’t disrupt the market.

There are now 17.81 million Ether staked on the Beacon Chain. At a current price of $1,776, which means $31.6 billion can be incrementally unlocked over time.

While the Ethereum Foundation described the last testnet run on Goerli as “smooth,” there was a notable delay in activation time due to many validators not updating their client software.

However, Beiko is confident it won’t be an issue this time, as Ethereum validators will be economically incentivized to make the update for the Mainnet.

Because of EIP-4895, Shapella is considered the most significant hard fork on Ethereum since Paris (The Merge) changed the network consensus mechanism from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake on Sept 15.

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