The Ethereum Foundation has disclosed that withdrawals of ETH staked on the beacon chain to individual execution layer accounts will be available soon. It revealed this in a blog post on December 29 to its research team and customers.
The blog update also stated that the consensus layer core specs are “nearing completion,” revealing further that client teams are implementing and testing the withdrawal functionality.
Since switching from proof of work (PoW) to proof of stake (PoS) in mid-September 2022, enabling the withdrawal functionality for stakeholders has been one of the most anticipated milestones on Ethereum’s roadmap.
Since its inception till date, over 15,766,262 ETH (worth over $18B) has been staked on the Beacon chain across 492,000 validators. Staking on Ethereum’s Beacon chain first went live on December 1, 2020, with investors ultimately locked in until whenever the Ethereum developer community finalized the withdrawal functionality. Even when the function goes live, Ethereum’s roadmap suggests the withdrawal will be available to users over time rather than immediately.
The most recent update from the Ethereum Foundation notably does not include a definite timeline. However, it reassures investors that the functionality is a top priority and would likely go live in 2023.
Ethereum continues on long-path to scalability
Ethereum’s migration to the PoS consensus mechanism earlier this year marked a significant step towards broader efforts to scale the network and improve security.
In a recent development, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin shared an updated roadmap on how Ethereum plans to reach mainstream-level capacity. The new roadmap notably includes a new “The Scourge” phase during which Ethereum will solve a long-known bottleneck around miner extractable value (MEV) transactions.
At full scale, Ethereum developers envision the network handling over 100,000 transactions per second at significantly lower fees. However, that path could take at least a few more years to achieve, with the staking unlocking function the most imminent on the list of objectives.
