The fork is a test environment for the upcoming Shanghai upgrade.



Shanghai is expected to unlock the withdrawals of the staked ETH in the Beacon chain.




Blockchain developers successfully launched a ‘shadow fork’ for the upcoming Shanghai upgrade in the Ethereum blockchain. The shadow fork – a test model for the actual mainnet that lets developers check if the code for the proposed upgrade functions well on a real blockchain – happened Monday at 5:30 am ET.



Shanghai upgrade is expected to take place by March, and among the proposed amendments is to allow for the withdrawals of the staked coins, which happened during the proof of stake transition. Ethereum developers have also noted that more shadow forks will be released in the coming week in the run-up to the network upgrade.



Amidst the upgrade, technical problems were reported for some of the Ethereum’s nodes using Geth clients, according to developer Marius Van Der Wijden, who said that the network was working to have the clients synchronized with the rest of the network.



The Next Update, a Testnet, Is Expected Before the End of February



Also in the offing is a public testnet proposed by the developers to take place before the end of February. The test network is set to bring on board the staking firms to test the Shanghai upgrade. Ahead of the update, the blockchain developers have also noted that additional forks would copy the network’s data to the testing environment or the shadow fork.



The Ethereum community has been concerned about how soon they can access their staked assets. There have been delays in the past for such forks in Ethereum, including the most recent PoS merge. On-chain data shows that the number of staked Ether in the validator contract to be unstaked is 16,167,572.



In November, the team behind the Shanghai update introduced the Shandong testnet but later replaced it with an enhanced alternative. Ahead of last year’s big change to the Ethereum network, the Merge, the blockchain underwent several test forks before the final deployment.