A target date of April 12 was set during the All Core Developers Execution Layer #157 call Thursday for Ethereum’s long-awaited Shanghai hard fork.

It marks the completion of Ethereum’s transition to a proof-of-stake (PoS) network, enabling staked ETH withdrawals.

On or around April 12, after developers vote on and confirm the date via GitHub, slot 6209536 will be set in stone for the Shanghai upgrade. Since Ethereum switched to a PoS consensus mechanism in September in an event known as the Merge, the network began using validators instead of miners, which means Shanghai will be slightly delayed from the developers’ original target for this month. To approve or add blocks to the blockchain, validators had to stake 32 ETH.

As part of Ethereum’s PoS Beacon Chain, validators were made aware that their staked ETH and any rewards would remain locked up until Shanghai. Some validators have remained locked up since December 2020.

Validators can decide what to do with their stake after April 12.

For Ethereum withdrawals to work properly, developers have run numerous tests since the Merge. Despite the fact that validator nodes did not upgrade in time, all three testnet hard forks on Ethereum’s testnets ran smoothly. The last hard fork on Goerli experienced low participation rates.