Ethereum to Launch Zhejiang Public Withdrawal Testnet

The "Zhejiang" public withdrawal test net is scheduled to be live on February 1 at 15:00 UTC, as stated in a post authored by an Ethereum Foundation developer named Parithosh Jayanthi on January 31. Six days after the Zhejiang testnet is activated, the Shanghai and Capella testnets will both be activated at the same time, which is epoch 1350. As Jayanthi observed: "This is also a perfect chance for all of the tools to try out how they wish to gather, present, and utilise the information about the withdrawals. You have the option of setting a withdrawal address and attempting to convert 0x00 credentials to 0x01 format. By leaving your validator, you are able to try both partial and complete withdrawals."

When the Shanghai update is completely rolled out, users will be able to withdraw their staked Ether (ETH) assets and the prizes associated with those assets. Users have been able to stake their Ethereum on the proof-of-stake network ever since the successful completion of the Ethereum Merge update in September of last year. Despite this, funds are still unavailable until a fresh patch is installed.

Zhejiang will be the first public testnet to open following the Merge update, according to a statement made by another Ethereum engineer by the name of Barnabas Busa. The whole withdrawal source code has been made available on nodes.ethereum.org, despite the fact that it is currently in beta.

The much-anticipated Shanghai hard fork is now scheduled to take place in March 2023, according to the estimations of the developers working for the Ethereum Foundation. Additionally, the next Zhejiang testnet will have all Ethereum Improvement Protocols (EIPs) that were included into the Shanghai upgrade. This includes timestamp-based forking and other features.

The developers have EIP-4844 scheduled for release in either May or June of this year. This will be the next update on their roadmap after Shanghai. The potential for EIP-4844 to reduce transaction costs and boost the scalability of layer-2 rollups on Ethereum has been cited as a possible benefit by industry experts.