Ethereum: Final Testnet Upgrade Brings Shanghai Closer Than Ever

The Ethereum Shanghai upgrade is now one step closer to being activated live on the mainnet blockchain sometime in April as the final testnet, Goerli, is upgraded.

The final dress rehearsal for Ethereum's forthcoming major upgrade, "Shapella," has taken place on the Goerli testnet.

#Ethereum's Shanghai Upgrade is one step closer.

The hard fork is now being tested on the Goerli public testnet.

Here's what it's all about 👇 pic.twitter.com/m83sQ77qrd

— Binance (@binance) March 15, 2023

The upgrade was triggered at epoch 162304 at 10:26 a.m. UTC on March 14. Although the epoch did not finalize initially due to low validator participation rates, it did later finalize, as indicated by Arbitrum developer "Terence. eth."

"15 epochs later, Goerli has finalized. There was nothing wrong with the client software. We just had to get the offline operators to upgrade. It was a good stress test. On to the next one. Mainnet," Terence.eth tweeted.

Three testnets were used, with Goerli being the final one to go through the scenario. Given that it has the most validators and most closely resembles the activity on the Ethereum blockchain, this test was the most anticipated of the three.

Tim Beiko, an Ethereum developer, celebrates the historic moment on Twitter. "Goerli forked," he tweeted.

A mainnet launch date has not yet been decided upon, as reported earlier, although Beiko states that it will "probably" be decided upon during the March 16 devs meeting, "assuming things go well on Goerli."

According to Beiko, the teams advised waiting before any potential mainnet fork for four weeks following the Goerli upgrade, implying that the mainnet hard fork could occur by mid-April.