On April 12, the Shapella network update will be launched on the Ethereum mainnet as a result of a formal agreement among core developers.
Tim Beiko, the lead developer of Ethereum’s core protocol, conducted a week-long discussion among members of the Ethereum Foundation that resulted in the confirmation of the epoch, slot, and time.
The Shapella upgrade will take place at network epoch 194,048, the Ethereum Foundation announced in a blog post on Tuesday. An epoch in Ethereum is a collection of 32 network blocks, and this epoch is anticipated to occur on April 12 at 6:27 p.m. EDT.
The Ethereum Improvement Proposal EIP-4895 will “push” staked Ethereum from the Beacon Chain to the execution layer (also known as the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)) — allowing Ethereum validators to withdraw their Ether from the Beacon Chain.
Additionally, the bug bounty programme for Shapella vulnerabilities will continue through April 5 according to Tuesday’s upgrade confirmation. The bug bounty payment was recently raised by the Ethereum Foundation to $500,000.
The previous testnet run on Goerli was seamless, according to the Ethereum Foundation, however there was a significant delay in activation time since many validators did not update their client software.
Beiko is convinced that there won’t be a problem this time around as Ethereum validators will be given financial incentives to make the mainnet update.