Ethereum Completes Shapella Upgrade, Boosts Performance and Price

Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency, has completed its Shapella upgrade on April 12, 2023. The upgrade is part of Ethereum’s transition to version 2.0, which will improve its scalability, security, and energy efficiency.

The Shapella upgrade changed the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), which runs smart contracts on the network. The upgrade supported more programming languages and smart contract standards, and enabled the withdrawal of ETH staked on the beacon chain, a parallel network that coordinates Ethereum 2.0 validators. This increased the liquidity and security of the staked ETH.

The upgrade also implemented a Layer 2 gas fee reduction scheme, which reduced the cost and congestion of transactions on the network. Layer 2 solutions are protocols that run on top of the main blockchain, but process transactions faster and cheaper.

The upgrade had a positive impact on the performance and price of Ethereum. According to the official Ethereum website, the annual percentage rate (APR) for staking ETH increased slightly to 4.92% after the upgrade. The total amount of staking was 18,002,822 ETH, and the total number of validators was 562,893. The price of Ethereum also rose after the upgrade, reaching a new high of $4,500.

The Shapella upgrade was one of the steps for Ethereum to move towards version 2.0, which will switch from proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism to proof-of-stake (PoS), and introduce sharding, a technique that splits the network into multiple parallel chains.