Ethereum validators will be able to withdraw their Ether from the Beacon Chain as soon as April 12, when the Shapella hard fork activation is scheduled

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Ethereum network is heading towards the new major update – Shapella hard fork – which will enable Ether withdrawals on Beacon Chain.

Shapella marks two parallel network developments. Firstly, there’s the Shanghai upgrade?happening on the execution side of Ethereum. Simultaneously, the Capella upgrade will take place on the consensus side. Hence the two names eventually merged into “Shapella.”

Ethereum core developers confirmed?that the?Shapella upgrade will take effect at epoch 194,048, which is scheduled for 10:27 pm UTC on April 12.

The hard fork will “push” staked Ether from the Beacon Chain to the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), aka the execution layer, to enable its partial and full withdrawals. Thus, ETH validators will get the opportunity to stake the tokens without locking them up indefinitely, perform transaction validations, and receive rewards for newly created tokens.

At the same time, the network has prepared?several precautionary mechanisms to ensure a flood of withdrawn Ether doesn’t disrupt the market. With 17.81 million Ether staked on the Beacon Chain, about?$31.6 billion worth of ETH can be unlocked for withdrawals over time.

Shapella is considered the most significant hard fork on Ethereum since the Merge which introduced a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism to the network.

However, the launch may face delays due to many validators not updating their client software. Ethereum aims to solve this issue with economic incentives.

Moreover, to avoid any disruptions to the upcoming hard fork, the Ethereum Foundation doubled rewards for any bugs found in the Shapella code. Depending on how “critical” the bug is, those who discover a malfunction may get between $2,000 and $250,000.