The “Zhejiang” public withdrawal testnet is scheduled to go live on February 1 at 15:00 UTC, as stated in a post written 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 be activated at the same time, which is the time of 1350. As Jayanthi observed: “This is also a perfect opportunity for all tools test how they want to collect, present, and use information about withdrawals. You have the option to set a withdrawal address and attempt to convert 0x00 credentials to 0x01 format. By leaving your validator, you can attempt partial and full withdrawals.”

When the Shanghai update is fully implemented, users will be able to withdraw their staked Ether (ETH) assets and prizes associated with those assets. Users have been able to stake their Ethereum on the proof-of-stake network since the successful completion of the Ethereum Merge update in September last year. Despite this, the funds are still not available until a new patch is installed.

Zhejiang will be the first public testnet to open after the Merge update, according to a statement made by another Ethereum engineer named Barnabas Busa. The full withdrawal source code is available at nodes.ethereum.org, though it is currently in beta.

The long-awaited Shanghai hard fork is now scheduled for March 2023, according to estimates from developers working for the Ethereum Foundation. Also, the upcoming Zhejiang testnet will have all of the Ethereum Enhancement Protocols (EIPs) that were included in the Shanghai update. This includes forks based on timestamps and other features.

The developers have EIP-4844 scheduled for release in May or June of this year. This will be the next update to their roadmap after Shanghai. Industry insiders have mentioned the potential of EIP-4844 to reduce transaction costs and increase the scalability of Layer 2 rollups on Ethereum as a potential benefit.