Just two weeks after the execution of the highly anticipated Shanghai Capella Upgrade on the third and final Goerli testnet, Ethereum core developers have announced the finalized date for the execution of the Shapella fork on the Ethereum mainnet.

Additional read: Ethereum Shanghai-Capella Upgrade goes live on Goerli testnet!

For the first time since December 2020, since the launch of the PoS-based Beacon chain, staked ETH to the Ethereum 2.0 deposit contract will now be allowed to be withdrawn after the implementation of the Shanghai Capella hard fork on the Ethereum mainnet on April 12, at epoch 194048. Calculating from the epoch, the hard fork is scheduled for 10:27 pm UTC on April 12, which translates to roughly about 3:57 am on April 13, Indian Standard Time.

The withdrawals will be enabled by Ethereum Improvement Proposal EIP-4895 by “pushing” staked ETH to the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) from the PoS Beacon Chain. The EVM is also otherwise known as the execution layer of the Ethereum network and this would finally enable unstaking of locked ETH tokens.

The date for the same had been announced shortly after the Goerli testnet execution but the actual epoch has been confirmed following week-long discussions and deliberations between members of the Ethereum foundation, which was led by Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko.

However, it must also be noted that while the hard fork is going to allow for partial and full withdrawals, there are several mechanisms in place to ensure that a flood of ETH tokens does not disrupt the market and the supply doesn't affect the price of ETH too much.

According to the latest numbers from Etherscan.io, there are now over 17.9 million ETH staked to the Beacon chain. At the current value of $1780, a total of nearly $32 billion in ETH tokens can be incrementally unlocked over time.

Last time around, during the Goerli update, the fork did see some delay in the activation time due to the fact that many validators on the testnet did not bother to update their client software, but the Ethereum Foundation classified the Goerli testnet run as "smooth". This is explained by Tim Beiko that this issue won't pop up on the Ethereum mainnet as while testnet tokens have no monetary value, the mainnet ETH has, hence validators on the mainnet will be economically incentivized to make the update.

Read more on Ethereum Shanghai Upgrade

Ethereum Price impact post the announcement

Ethereum's native crypto token, ETH has been performing extremely well especially since the beginning of the year, in line with the broader market recovery. ETH is up over 50% as of writing since January 1 and also has been responding well to positive developmental new flows from the Ethereum Foundation too.

As one can observe from the chart above, the price of ETH took a hit when the news about the crash of the Silicon Valley Bank broke for the first time, but it quickly recovered thanks to heightened enthusiasm ahead of the Shapella hard fork on the Goerli testnet.

So now, going forward by April 12, we could see another continuation rally in the price of ETH token, provided the overall market conditions remain optimistic.

Values as on March 29, 2023.

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