After a months-long wait since the Merge, Ethereum developers have set a target date for the network’s highly anticipated Shanghai hard fork. 

The upgrade will enable the network’s stakers to withdraw their locked Ether (ETH) for the first time since December 2020. 

Withdrawing Staked ETH

During a recorded call among core developers on Thursday, devs set April 12 as their target date for “Shapella” – the dual upgrade enabling ETH withdrawals. Shapella is a combination of the words Shanghai and Capella, changes to Ethereum’s execution and consensus layer respectively. 

Once devs vote on and confirm the upgrade via GitHub, April 12 will be set in stone – a month’s delay from their initial target date of March 2023. To be precise, popular developer Tim Beiko tweeted on Thursday that the fork would occur at block 6209536, which will arrive at 10:27:35 PM UTC on April 12. 

This follows several successful simulation upgrades across Ethereum’s testnets, including its Goerli testnet on Tuesday. Things ran smoothly besides some issues surrounding validators who were late to upgrade – problems that Beiko claimed are not likely to repeat on the mainnet. 

Again, this is something that might be worse on Goerli than mainnet, as it’s more likely those nodes are being run with less resources than mainnet ones.

— timbeiko.eth (@TimBeiko) March 14, 2023

Ethereum’s move to proof of stake in September allowed ETH owners to b