Ethereum prepares for another major upgrade- Everything you need to know

ambcrypto.com:

According to Santiment data, both the ETH exchange inflow and outflow have been declining. This is symptomatic of the sluggish behavior of on-chain and off-chain wallet holders.

The Ethereum development team, on the other hand, has been moving quickly to begin the Shanghai upgrade, the next phase of the Ethereum merge.

The core Ethereum development team is starting to work on Shanghai, the next major upgrade to the Ethereum network.

To that effect, a testnet, called Shandong, has been built to get things rolling. Many Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) will be implemented in Shandong for testing before being narrowed down by Ethereum’s core developers to a smaller set of changes for inclusion in Shanghai when it goes online.

With the Merge as the first phase in a five-phase upgrade, the Surge will see the introduction of sharding on Ethereum.

Sharding is a crucial step in improving the scalability of the blockchain’s data storage and retrieval mechanisms. Sharding will be utilized by Ethereum in conjunction with layer-2 rollups to distribute the massive data sets across the network.

Following the Merge, the next three phases of Ethereum’s continuing development — Verge, Purge, and Splurge — will occur over the course of the next few years.

At the time of writing, DefiLlama data showed that Ethereum held a 57% share of the Total Value Locked (TVL) across all chains.

As rival smart contract networks have emerged, Ethereum’s once-dominant 90% market share in the nascent Decentralized Financial Technology industry has been eroded (DeFi).

With these planned changes and the cryptocurrency market’s potential recovery, Ethereum’s TVL, which was over $30 billion, might rise.

The number of active addresses exceeded two million,