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The Shanghai hard fork is expected to occur when the Beacon chain epoch reaches 194048 estimated to take place on April 12, 2023, 10:27 pm UTC / April 13, 2023, 2:27am GST (epoch 1681338455).
Announcement | Ethereum Shanghai Hard Fork
Evaluation Process
MidChains has:
Evaluated what is changing?
Analysed the impact of the changes.
What is Changing?
EIP-4895: Beacon chain push withdrawals as operations - This EIP proposes a new method to support validator withdrawals to be pushed from the Beacon chain onto the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) via a new “system-level” operation type. The architecture is “push”-based, rather than “pull”-based, where withdrawals are required to be processed in the execution layer as soon as they are dequeued from the consensus layer. This EIP suggests a new type of object – the “withdrawal operation” as it has special semantics different from other existing types of EVM transactions.
EIP-3651: Warm COINBASE– This EIP proposes to allow block builders and validators access the COINBASE address (which is a software used by validators and block builders), at a lower gas cost. The COINBASE address shall be warm at the start of transaction execution, in accordance with the actual cost of reading that account. At the start of transaction execution, “accessed_addresses” shall be initialized to also include the address returned by COINBASE. This is expected to improve Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) payments by correcting a previous oversight on the cost to access the COINBASE address and gives some added benefits to users and developers that open-up new use cases. (Coinbase in this case refers to the first transactions in a new block on a blockchain network. This is not related to the entity exchange Coinbase)
EIP-3855: PUSH0 instruction – introduces a code dubbed “PUSH0” (“0x5f”) instruction, that will reduce gas costs for developers by pushing the constant value 0 onto the stack. The “base” gas cost is used for instructions that places constant values onto the stack, such as ADDRESS, and ORIGIN, among others.
EIP-3860: Limit and meter initcode – introduces a cap on the gas cost for developers when interacting with “initcode” (a code used by developers for smart contracts). This is an extension of the EIP-170 by introducing a maximum size limit for “initcode” - (MAX_INITCODE_SIZE = 2 * MAX_CODE_SIZE = 49152). The EIP-3860 further introduces a charge of “2” gas for every 32-byte chunk of “initcode” to represent the cost of jumpdest-analysis. Lastly, the size limit results in the nice-to-have property that EVM code size, code offset (PC), and jump offset fits a 16-bit value.
EIP-6049: Deprecate SELFDESTRUCT – proposes to deprecate the SELFDESTRUCT opcode and warns against its use as it has a potential future behavior change. The EIP-6049 is only a deprecation warning. Client teams expect SELFDESTRUCT semantics to change in future network upgrades, but the opcode's behavior remains unchanged in Shanghai.
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