The public testnet will be deployed on February 1 at 15:00 (UTC) and will allow Ethereum validators to independently test withdrawals of staked ETH.
Ethereum Foundation Developer Parithosh Jayanthi revealed that the Zhejiang public testnet was ready for deployment on the mainnet. It’ll be the first public testnet since The Merge to allow anyone to test staking withdrawals.
Six days after the launch of Zhejiang, the public testnets Shanghai and Capella will be deployed at epoch 1350. Practical success in these testnets will allow Ethereum developers to accelerate the Shanghai hard fork, enabling users to access staked ETH.
Recall that staking ETH became possible even before the main network update in September 2022, when Ethereum officially switched to Proof-of-Stake. Developers initially assured that withdrawals would become available immediately after The Merge, but that didn’t happen. Rumors started swirling on Twitter that Ethereum validators wouldn’t be able to access their funds until 2024. Due to this, Ethereum Foundation developers decided to speed up the process of preparing for the Shanghai hard fork, focusing their efforts specifically on ensuring that ETH can be withdrawn from staking. And in order to avoid bugs and eliminate potential vulnerabilities of the network, the developers created devnet and even tried to hack Ethereum.
