What’s in and what’s out for Ethereum’s Shanghai upgrade

Ethereum core developers have opted to prioritize the enabling of staking withdrawals via the Shanghai upgrade first before implementing The Surge-related Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP)-4884.

As reported by Cointelegraph, the next key milestone on Ethereum’s roadmap is the Shanghai upgrade, which will enable withdrawals for ETH stakers/validators from the Beacon Chain — among other things.

EIP-4884 is also important and was initially expected to be packaged in with Shanghai, introducing “proto-danksharding” to significantly enhance Layer 2 rollup scalability (The Surge) ahead of the full implementation of the major Sharding upgrade late next year.

However, according to Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko at the latest Ethereum Core Developers Meeting on Dec. 8, the ultimate consensus was to focus on Shanghai first to avoid any potential delays if EIP-4844 were to not be ready in time.

In a rundown thread on Twitter, Beiko noted that everyone agreed to “(1) seeing Shanghai happen quickly, ideally around March and (2) following this with a fork centered around EIP-4844.”

While EIP-4844 won’t be included, the devs have agreed to include a set of EIPs that essentially upgrade the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), including introducing a new EVM contract format, code/data separations and new operation codes.

Beiko noted that as these upgrades, known as EVM Object Format (EOF) are quite easy to walk back and remove from Shanghai, if devs haven’t finished working on it when Shanghai is ready for implementation, then EOF will simply be removed and shipped later.

Additionally, a set of previously agreed upon EIPs will roll out alongside Shanghai, the list includes EIP-3651: Warm Coinbase, EIP-3855: PUSH0 instruction, EIP-3860: Limit and meter initcode and EIP-4895: Beacon chain push withdrawals as operations.

So, that’s where we landed for Shanghai: Withdrawals, EOF & a few already implemented EIPs (PUSH0, Warm COINBASE, Limit/Meter initcode) are what we…