After months of meticulous preparations, the Ethereum validators can take a moment of relief as their staked Ethers will be available for withdrawal from today. The Ethereum Shapella or Shanghai upgrade will take place at epoch 194048, scheduled for 22:27:35 UTC on Apr. 12, 2023.

The Ethereum Shapella upgrade combines changes to the execution layer (Shanghai), consensus layer (Capella), and the Engine API. Among the expected changes with the hard fork include EIP-3651 on the Warm COINBASE, EIP-3855 that focuses on PUSH0 instruction, EIP-3860 pertaining to the Limit and meter initcode, EIP-4895 that entails the Beacon chain push withdrawals as operations, and EIP-6049 that works on Deprecate SELFDESTRUCT.

As a result, Ethereum validators and node operators are requested to work in collaboration to enable a smooth transition.

Economic Changes in Ethereum Ecosystem 

With the Shapella upgrade, over $34 billion worth of ether will be made available for withdrawal and liquidatable on the secondary market. However, Ethereum withdrawals are expected to be enabled in two ways including partial and full withdrawals. In the partial, Ethereum validators will access anything above the 32 ETH staked including rewards and excess balance payments.

With about 563k Ethereum validators, the total amount of partial withdrawals are expected at around $2 billion and will happen in the next five days. As a result, the selling pressure on the second-largest digital asset will not be enormous to strain the market.

On the other hand, a full withdrawal will enable the validators to access the 32-staked ETH. Depending on the number of validators that are staking ETH, the number of withdrawals varies over time. Basically, the more withdrawal requests on staked eth, the fewer ethers will be processed by the network. Notably, analysts estimate a total of 500 days for the entire staked ETH to be withdrawn.