Just two days after the implementation of the Shanghai Capella Upgrade on the third and final Goerli testnet, the target date for the much-awaited Shanghai hard fork on the Ethereum mainnet has been set for April 12. On the latest All Core Developers Execution (ACDE) Call #157, Ethereum's code developers approved the fresh target deadline.

The Shanghai Capella upgrade features a set of five Ethereum Improvement Proposals or EIPs, which includes the very highly anticipated EIP-4895, that will enable locked Ether to be unstaked from the PoS-based Beacon Chain. This move would essentially complete the transition of the largest smart contract platform from a proof-of-work (PoW) to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism.

The target slot for the upgrade has been set for epoch 6209536, which translates to April 12 at about 10:27 pm UTC, or April 13, at 3:57 am IST. This hard fork had initially been forecasted for the month of March but developers later had to push it to April due to delays caused during the Sepolia testnet upgrades.

Read more on: Ethereum Shanghai Upgrade

With the EIP-4895 slated to be rolled out to the Ethereum mainnet, validators on the PoS chain will now receive rewards payments automatically at periodic intervals in withdrawal addresses. Further, stakers can even choose to exit positions entirely and reclaim their full balance.

According to the latest numbers from Etherscan.io, Ethereum PoS smart contract has attracted over 17.69 million ETH tokens ever since it was opened to the public back in December 2020. This is worth a little over $30 billion at the time of writing this article.  

The work behind this transition started ever since the PoS-based Beacon Chain was launched back in December 2020. But the actual transition to PoS started last year on September 15, with the Ethereum Merge, where the existing mining mechanism was replaced by a validator system that is typically used in a PoS-based network.

Ethereum Price impact post the announcement

Ethereum's native token, ETH has been on a strong rally ever since the beginning of the year but saw a dip last week amid the Silicon Valley Bank collapse, and the brief depegging incident in the USDC, which is the second-largest stablecoin by market capitalization.

But since then, ETH's price has recovered strongly from its lows, and it is currently at one of the highest points ever since the beginning of 2023. ETH price in the past 24 hours also saw some healthy gains amid an overall bullish sentiment in the crypto market as a whole, with BTC gaining over 6% and ETH gaining a little over 4% in that timeframe.

From technical indications, ETH's price is well positioned to continue its rally, with a reasonably strong Relative Strength Index level to help the upward move, and also supported by the golden crossover of the 50 and 200-day moving averages. Ethereum's native token ETH is currently trading near 6-month highs and propelled by positive technicals, we can see a strong follow-up rally coming in if the overall sentiments support the view.

Values as on March 17, 2023.

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