Ethereum Developers To Launch Testnet Supporting Staked ETH Withdrawals

Ethereum developers will launch a public testnet later today that supports Beacon Chain withdrawals, with a rehearsal of the network’s upcoming Shanghai and Capella upgrades scheduled to go live six days later.

Barnabus Busa, a DevOps engineer at the Ethereum Foundation, tweeted on Jan. 31 that Ethereum’s core developers had agreed on a date for the public testnet’s deployment.

“The Zhejiang public testnet is going live tomorrow (1st of Feb 15:00 UTC, 2023). Shanghai+Capella will be triggered 6 days later (at epoch 1350),” Busa said.

“Once the upgrade has been triggered, you can test partial and full withdrawals as well as a few other EIPs that are included in the upgrade,” tweeted Parithosh Jayanthi, a DevOps engineer at the Ethereum Foundation.

Busa added that a faucet for testnet ETH will be deployed shortly after its launch. Users can monitor for information and news relating to the testnet at zhejiang.ethpandaops.io.

The news comes as Ethereum developers aim to enable staked ETH withdrawals sometime in March or April.

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Ethereum’s Beacon Chain consensus layer launched in December 2020, allowing ETH holders to stake their coins for the first time.

But despite the Beacon Chain merging with Ethereum’s execution layer in September 2022 to boot Proof-of-Work miners from the network in favor of Proof of Stake validators, stakers still cannot withdraw their ETH from the Beacon Chain.

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Roughly 16.3M ETH worth $28.5B is currently staked.

In January, Ethereum’s developers responded by announcing they will prioritize Beacon Chain withdrawals for the network’s next upgrades, the Shanghai and Capella forks — which will update the code for Ethereum’s execution and consensus layers, respectively. They followed up by launching a shadow fork supporting withdrawals on Jan. 23.

The recent progress towards enabling withdrawals has bolstered the performance of liquid staking derivative (LSD) providers. Many analysts expect Ethereum’s next upgrade to bolster LSD adoption and drive traders to eliminate much of the spread between ETH and LSD tokens.

The native tokens of top LSD providers Lido, Rocket Pool, and Stakewise have surged 126%, 93.5%, and 107% in January, according to Coingecko.