Ethereum Shapella upgrade gets new date, making way for un-staking ETH

Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko

Major changes to the consensus layer include full and partial withdrawals for validators and independent state and block historical accumulators, replacing the original singular historical roots.

Partial withdrawal means validators can withdraw Ether (ETH) rewards in excess of 32 Ether and keep validating. In case they want a full withdrawal, validators can fully exit and take all 32 Ether and rewards and stop doing the work

The upcoming upgrade would enable validators to withdraw their staked Ether (ETH) from the Beacon Chain to the execution layer. Moreover, the upgrade would bring changes to the execution layer and consensus layer adding new features, making it a key upgrade following The Merge.

Stakers and non-stakers who operate nodes must, however, upgrade their nodes to the most recent Ethereum client versions in order to take advantage of the Sepolia upgrade. After the deployment of the Sepolia upgrade, the next step would be the release of the Shanghai upgrade on the Ethereum Goerli test network, expected to commence in March.