The Ethereum Foundation made the announcement on Nov. 24 that developers working on the platform had reached a consensus on eight Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) to investigate as part of the Shanghai update. This update is the next major update after the merger and transition to proof-of-stake consensus.

The Beacon Chain Staked Ether (ETH) is scheduled to be unlocked as one of the main features anticipated to be included in the Shanghai hard fork. This will make it possible for the assets to be retired along with the upgrade, meaning users who staked their stakes on Ethereum before the merger will be able to access those tokens in addition to any other rewards that may be available.

According to a previous roadmap, unlocked ETH was supposed to be available 6-12 months after the Merger.

One of the ideas that was accepted is known as EIP 4844. This proposal focuses on the use of proto-danksharding technology and is anticipated to increase network performance while lowering transaction costs, which will be a great gain for scalability.

Other EIPs, such as EIP 3540, EIP 3670, EIP 4200, EIP 4570, and EIP 5450, deal with the modernization of Ethereum virtual machines.

One of the most anticipated updates by the community is the Shanghai testnet version, which was named Shandong and went live on October 18. This version allows developers to work on implementations such as the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) object format. This update is one of the most anticipated because it separates the encoding from the data, which can be beneficial for on-chain validators.