Late last year we were all excited to hear about ethereum and its upgrade from the proof of work mechanism to the proof of stake mechanism but did you know that there was a little flaw to that? When ethereum upgraded from proof of work to proof of stake it means that validators can stake ETH to validate blocks on the blockchain and get rewarded, but then these staked ETH can not be unstaked or the staked rewards can not be redeem until the Shanghai upgrade. This upgrade will enables stakers to unstake their ETH and redeem their rewards.
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Before the Shanghai upgrade which is now, if you are staking your ETH as a validator you dont know when you will have your assets unstaked, unlike Hive that we can stake and unstake, but we will have to wait for 13 complete weeks to get 100% of our assets back. Besides there is a criteria to be an ethereum validator, anybody with any amount of Ethereum can’t be a validator they need to have at least 32 ETH staked to be considered an ethereum validator, when staked, can’t be withdrawn because the blockchain doesn’t have the feature to enable unstaking for now, hence the Shanghai upgrade. The Shanghai upgrade is rumoured to be launched later this month of April, that is the next big event for Ethereum.
According to data and statistics the total number of ethereum that was staked and will be having the chances of being unstaked is over 17 Million Ethereum, that is over $3 Billion, I don’t think its possible to have the whole number of ethereum unstaked and then sold all at once, although some people think its possible. After the upgrade validators will be able to unstable their staked ETH. I guess all these is to make sure the Ethereum blockchain security is tight because I tried wondering why take this much time and drama to make a feature like unstaking available when we have this feature on other blockchains on a platter. For more info check here