Let’s note that there are indeed reasons for speeding up the withdrawal of stale ethers, and these are user expectations. After all, the deposit contract for staking in a separate PoS chain called Beacon Chain went live in December 2020, which means some blockchain users have been staking ETH for more than two years without the possibility of withdrawal.

It’s important to note that there were almost 16 million ETH in the Etherium stack as of early January 2023, which represents just over 13 per cent of the cryptocurrency in circulation. This is low compared to other popular blockchains, where most digital assets in circulation could easily be in stacking. Well, the higher volume of cryptocurrency for stacking means more blockchain security.

Stacking volume of Ethers as of early January 2023

In the case of Etherium, the low figure is due to investor uncertainty. Still, they agreed before sending the cryptocurrency into stacking that the withdrawal date of their coins remains unknown. And since in the case of validators we are talking about at least 32 ETH, such a risk might be too much for some.

In fact, that’s why the developers decided to step up and even simplify the “Shanghai” update to meet the demand for stacking and the needs of current validators. However, some in the blockchain team disagree with this approach.

When will Etherium update to Shanghai

It was previously reported that Shanghai was being prepared for launch by March 2023, which is two months away. However, now some Ethereum developers have started to express concern that the update is being carried out too quickly. This is allegedly due to fear of community disapproval and at the expense of technical costs, which could have long-term implications for the network. Here’s what developer Mika Zoltu said about this.

It feels like we are not thinking about the long term “health” of Etherium. We are only thinking about how we can do what the public needs us to do.

The volume of funds in the deposit smart contract

According to Decrypt’s sources, Zoltu and several other developers are concerned that the recent decision to accelerate the release of Shanghai will result in significant “technical debt” while also reducing the number of innovations in the update. “Technical debt” is a future job or headache for developers that arises when they decide to prioritise speed of product release over code perfection.

In this case, the programmers decided not to make ETH output compatible with simple serialisation or SSZ, the flexible modern coding method. Instead of SSZ, Ether uses recursive prefix serialisation or RLP, an existing coding method that will eventually become obsolete.

Although the difference between the two is purely technical, it may crystallise into a new problem in the future. A significant number of developers have stated their willingness to move ETH output to the new serialisation method in a post-Shanghai update, dubbed Cancun.

Etherium creator Vitalik Buterin

But this will mean that withdrawals initiated between update releases will be encoded using the old method. All this accumulated information in the blockchain will eventually need to be transferred to SSZ. However, another developer Tomasz Stanczak said at another conference that Ethereum Foundation would still benefit from focusing on short-term withdrawals rather than long-term goals.


We believe that, in the end, Ethereum developers will be able to come up with a better choice in this situation. That said, they have previously confirmed plans for an update in the near future. Accordingly, abandoning such an idea is unlikely to be considered. Still, with their announcement the developers have set a certain bar of expectations, which the community is now focused on. And this is really important.


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