The long-awaited update of Ethereum’s Shanghai-Capella (Shapella) was officially completed. Validators started withdrawing staked ETH.
The mainnet Ethereum underwent the Shanghai hard fork, allowing users to finally access staked ETH. The update was triggered at 22:27 (UTC) on April 12.
According to beaconchai.in, users began actively withdrawing funds immediately after the update. Within the first hour after the hard fork was finalized, there were 4,333 withdrawals worth 12,859 ETH. Notably, this is only about 0.07% of the total amount of ETH staked by users.
The majority of withdrawals range from 2.8 ETH to 3.2 ETH, indicating that validators mostly only withdraw accrued rewards rather than withdraw locked ETH.
Nansen data shows that as of 11:00 a.m. (GMT+3) on April 13, a total of 109,599.35 ETH (~$210.8 million) were withdrawn. Another 19,869 validators are waiting for a full withdrawal of their staked funds amounting to 713,190 ETH. Lido DAO validators are the most active in withdrawing their money. The Lido Finance team updated the protocol’s functionality to ensure safe withdrawals of staked ETH.
It’s worth noting that the Shapella update caused considerable uncertainty among traders. For example, Kaiko reports that the hard fork could unlock $1.2-3 billion, which, in turn, would create a lot of pressure on ETH in the first few weeks after the update. As of this writing, according to CoinGecko, the value of ETH is $1,925, with the token showing a 2.7% gain in the last 24 hours.
Recall that Ethereum developers began preparations for the Shanghai update immediately after the network’s successful switch to the Proof-of-Stake algorithm. The community was actively circulating rumors that validators wouldn’t be able to unlock their funds until 2024, so the developers launched a devnet to identify potential problems and speed up the process. By the way, they’ve even tried hacking the main network.
