Crypto exchange Coinbase will begin processing unstaking withdrawals a day after the Shapella upgrade, but won’t be able to disclose how long it will take.
In a series of tweets on Wednesday, Coinbase explained what the procedure for unstaking ETH would look like after withdrawals are enabled with Shanghai.
6/ Since the Ethereum protocol controls the unstaking process and we’re simply the conduit, we can’t share an exact waiting period when you request to unstake.
— Coinbase 🛡️ (@coinbase) March 15, 2023
The exchange said it would begin taking requests to unstake in the immediate 24-hours that follow the chain upgrade. Although rewards will be passed on to users, this will only be done once they are released by Ethereum. Since this is something Coinbase has no control over, the exchange said it can’t share “an exact waiting period” for the process.
“We anticipate that demand for unstaking will be high soon after the upgrade and it may take the protocol weeks to months to process unstaking requests,” said Coinbase.
Validators have already begun testing ETH withdrawals on all three testnets, Zheijang, Sepolia and most recently, Goerli, after the Shapella upgrade was deployed on the networks over the last few weeks. Things appear to be going smoothly on these testing environments, but it could look a lot different when Shapella hits the mainnet next month.
Based on the network’s current specifications, there will be a daily limit of 57,600 partial withdrawals. Validators will also have to go through an exit queue and be able to exit based on the churn limit.
6/ As the number of validators increase, so does the churn limit. It increases by 1 at every interval of 65536 (above the minimum threshold) pic.twitter.com/iR3uskpevh
— Westie 🟪 (@WestieCapital) January 12, 2023
According to Blockworks Research’s Westie, if a third of validators on Ethereum attempted to exit on the same day, it would still take at least 97 days to complete the process.
