Shapella could bring institutional investors to Ethereum despite risks

Ethereum’s Shanghai/Capella upgrade — also known by the portmanteau Shapella — may not be the technical marvel of last year’s “Merge” or introduce turbocharged speeds to the network. 

Volumes of over 100,000 transactions per second will have to wait for future “danksharding” upgrades, according to the Ethereum Foundation.

But the hard fork remains an important step on Ethereum’s roadmap to the future, i.e., further shoring up the network’s new validation mechanism while (potentially) removing barriers for institutional investors.

Currently scheduled for 10:27 pm UTC on April 12, the upgrade will allow stakers to unlock their Ether (ETH) rewards — or even exit staking entirely — for the first time since September’s Merge.

It’s happening

Shapella is scheduled on mainnet for epoch 194048, scheduled for 22:27:35 UTC on Apr. 12, 2023

Client releases compatible with the upgrade are listed in the announcement below https://t.co/I0hSv9lnjz

— timbeiko.eth ☀️ (@TimBeiko) March 28, 2023

Pre-fork publicity hasn’t matched that surrounding last autumn’s change of consensus mechanisms from proof-of-work to a proof-of-stake (PoS). “This time, we won’t have a war room,” Freddy Zwanzger, Ethereum ecosystem lead at Blockdaemon, told Cointelegraph. Still, “there’s always risks” when one reshuffles the deck like this.

Ethereum’s stakers and validators will shortly be able to withdraw $32 billion of Ether from the Beacon Chain, which accounts for about 15% of the ETH’s circulating supply, according to Coinbase’s April 5 newsletter. Some worry that the upgrade, also known as the Shanghai hard fork, may lower the overall number of validators and put selling pressure on the network, among other concerns.

“Every hard fork brings some upgrade risk,” Paul Brody, EY’s global blockchain leader, told Cointelegraph, especially in cases like this where you’re enabling withdrawals. On the technical side, there could be bugs latent since “day zero” in some of the network’s staking smart contracts, for example, that may not emerge until the withdrawal date — though Brody doesn’t think that’s likely.

The upgrade should mitigate risks for investors. “Lower volatility plus a yield makes for a more familiar and less risky asset to hold long-term,” Rich Rosenblum, co-founder and president at GSR, a crypto market-making firm, told Cointelegraph.

More institutional investors?

Will Shapella really attract more institutional investors to the blockchain, as some believe? Research and brokerage firm AB Bernstein stated in a late-February research report that the upgrade could bring in staking from new institutional investors, and Blockdaemon’s Zwanzger, whose firm has many institutional clients, foresees more interest in Ethereum staking opportunities from large professional investors. Some institutional investors have been reluctant to lock up funds without a clear withdrawal option.

“There’s probably going to be a queue for the first couple of weeks,” Zwanzger said. “So they might be better off waiting until that comes down to normal levels.”

According to Rosenblum, “Once the PoS network is fully operational, more institutions will feel comfortable holding ETH, especially once the staking yield becomes more accessible.”

EY’s Brody, on the other hand, doesn’t see much of a change. “A lot of the big institutional investors that we know and work with are basically sitting on the sidelines. They want to comply, but they want to be more comfortable that they know what the rules are.” Comprehensive crypto reform legislation in the United States would probably be more likely to get them off the sidelines.

Longer-term risks

So what about regulatory risk, particularly in the United States? For years Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether were thought to be impervious to Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) scrutiny, with many U.S. regulators tacitly agreeing that the native coins for decentralized systems like these were more like commodities than securities, placing them under the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s jurisdiction. But with Ethereum’s move to a staking validation mechanism, some think the SEC may now have Ethereum in its sights.

Still, “I wouldn’t consider it a significant risk for the network,” even if that happens, said Zwanzger. The Ethereum protocol is global, and not all jurisdictions will likely share the SEC’s view of what needs regulating. Of course, other countries could ultimately choose to follow the U.S., so one never knows.

Others worry that Ethereum’s move to staking may herald increasing network centralization. In March, Cointelegraph reported that “concentration of ETH staked through third parties raises concerns over decentralization at Lido and Coinbase in particular.”

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