Ethereum Developers Can Test New EIPs on Pre-Shanghai Testnet ‘Shandong’

Ethereum developers can begin to test five new Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) on an early Pre-Shanghai testnet that has just been deployed. 

Developers at the Ethereum Foundation confirmed the launch of the testnet called “Shandong” in a tweet on Oct. 15.

“This is an experimental testnet run in cooperation with EF DevOps which activates a set of selected Shanghai-considered EIPs for early client testing,” said the Ethereum Foundation JavaScript team.

The testnet is said to activate five EIPs that have been proposed for inclusion with the Shanghai upgrade and is the first post-Merge only testnet that has been released.

Seeing as it is a pure JavaScript-based testnet and JavaScript is one of the most popular programming languages, the development team expects the environment to be particularly useful for dApp and front end developers to look into the code base running the network that drives protocol changes.

“We very much hope this will get some traction and usage. We might repeat in the future if this will be a successful first run (this is just a very fitting usage scenario for our EthereumJS client),” said the Ethereum Foundation.

One of the proposals slated to be deployed with the Shanghai upgrade is EIP-4895 – a proposal which will allow validators to withdraw the ETH they had staked in the Beacon Chain, along with the staking rewards earned over time.

According to the details of the proposal, the cost and computational complexity of these transactions will be on the lower end of the spectrum, meaning that staked ETH can be withdrawn without being subject to gas fees.