April 12, 2023: Shapella 🔓 🚀
Comprehensive guide to resources for Ethereum's Shanghai + Capella Upgrades
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Shanghai + Capella == Shapella
We are counting down the hours until the big Shapella Upgrade!
It’s the biggest upgrade since the Merge. The Merge was another incredibly complex technical feat that notably just worked smoothly. The typical chain user could continue using Ethereum uninterrupted from block to block without issue, whether your tx happened to be mined in a PoW block or a PoS one.
We hope Shapella continues uninterrupted for the typical user like the merge. Yet this upgrade may be even more meaningful, in that it suddenly affects the utility of various LSDs, and therefore may also affect the price (more users track Ethereum price than actually use it).
In case you’re wondering why it’s no longer called Shanghai, it’s not just a marker of rising anti-Sinitism.
During the Merge home stakers got to enjoy ASCII art in their console logs if they happened to be online. I’m not aware of any other such nerdy Easter Eggs to watch for during the Shapella Upgrade, but here is the comprehensive list of resources you can peruse to get yourself in the mood. If we missed anything, drop it in the comments and we’ll update all day.
Articles
The official Ethereum blog describes the EIPs contained within Shapella along with an extended FAQ for home stakers.
The legendary Arthur Hayes outsourced a post and preempted what would have been our article title. Good read anyway!
Consensys has a lengthy article explaining the ins and outs of Shapella. Perhaps more importantly, they’re also teasing an NFT to commemorate the event for email doxxers.
Bankless wrote up a great guide to the events, particularly with a focus on the price and their case for why the $2B in potential unlocks is not likely to affect the price. They also have a good summary of LSDs
Websites
The site wenmerge.com has a variety of visualizations along with a countdown timer.
Beaconcha.in remains our favorite site for exploring data related to staking and validators. They recently updated their site and are ready for the fun.
Dashboards
Nansen has prepared a public dashboard
Deebs DeFi also prepared a dashboard to spot whale behavior.
On Dune, 21Shares has a nice dashboard tracking Shapella stats
Another popular Dune dashboard was built by Black Mamba explorer
Crypto Koryo has a great thread on Shanghai effects as well as a comprehensive Dune dashboard tracking LSDs in particular.
Watch Parties
The official Ethereum Shapella Watch Party goes live at 3 PM PT hosted by EthStaker
The Bordel Hackerspace in Zurich will be watching and streaming various node metrics
Stakers
If you are a staker, make sure to take some time to update!
SomerEsat has been producing very detailed guides and updated everything to make sure you are on the current version.
Many stakers who are operating their own Rocket Pool staking node must also take action.
LSDs
Many people who use various LSDs for their staking solution may also be affected.
The most popular, Lido, is not expected to see withdrawals enabled until around May, so no particular action need be taken for people investing into stETH.
Rocket Pool’s also hard at work preparing for next week’s Atlas Upgrade, which will allow validators to withdraw staked ETH, and to lower the threshold for minipools from 16 to 8 ETH.
Stakers of $cbETH on Coinbase expect to begin processing withdrawals within 24 hours, though there may be delays due to the Ethereum withdrawal queue. The company prepared a blog post on the subject.
We’ll get to see over the next few months the specific effects on how this may shake up the LSD wars, if at all. Here are the final tally of discounts heading into the event:
We’re sure dozens of other resources exist which we may have missed. If we missed any, please drop them to us in the comments and we’ll update the article periodically as we wind our way towards the big event!
Disclaimers! Author solo stakes.
