On March 2nd, Ethereum developers agreed that the next hard fork of Ethereum, called Shanghai, will be launched on April 12th at slot 6209536. Both execution and consensus layer clients compatible with this hard fork have been released, and NBX has already upgraded its nodes in preparation for the hard fork.
During testnet testing, no blocks were produced for up to 90 minutes after the hard fork was tested, but this article points out that this may be because not everyone had upgraded their validators. There is likely to be a much greater incentive to upgrade mainnet Ethereum nodes as real values are at stake, and this is likely to go more smoothly on the mainnet.
A piece of important news from the Shanghai update is the ability to withdraw rewards from staked Ethereum, as described in Ethereum Improvement Proposal 4895. In short, this means that the approximately 17 million staked Ethereum can now be withdrawn from the staking contract if desired. For those who have registered a withdrawal address in advance, rewards will automatically be sent to this address by the Ethereum protocol. You can read more about it here.
Regarding withdrawing stake beyond rewards, there is a queue system with up to 16 withdrawals per slot (12 seconds), which also depends on how many validators are still validating eth2.0. Based on the numbers provided in the withdrawal FAQ, an estimate is that around 1125-2200 validators can withdraw staked Ethereum per day. This number might vary slightly. For example out of around 522 thousand validators, around 1600-1800 validators may be able to withdraw Ethereum per day.
In short: This is an exiting upgrade in the evolution of Proof of Stake on the Ethereum network and something users should be aware of since it will give important new functionality to the blockchain.
