Ethereum: Shadow Fork and Stealth Addresses affect the network by…

• Ethereum developers launch Withdrawal-Mainnet-Shadow-Fork-1 ahead of Shanghai.
• Vitalik Buterin proposes Stealth Addresses to tackle privacy concerns on the network.

The developers of Ethereum [ETH] made a significant advancement towards deploying the Shanghai update by creating a “Shadow Fork.” Additionally, Vitalik Buterin suggested a method for guaranteeing transaction privacy on the Ethereum network in a related development. What effects could these developments have on the network and ETH?

Read Ethereum’s [ETH] Price Prediction 2023-24

A Fork before the Fork

An Ethereum engineer named Marius Van Der Wijden announced the Mainnet Shadow Fork on 23 January. Wijden planned to introduce rogue nodes into the testnet that would send out faulty blocks and messages to trick other nodes into joining a phony fork of the network.

Withdrawal-Mainnet-Shadow-Fork-1 is finalizing 🚀🚀🚀

It started out with a few issues because the config wasn’t correctly applied on geth (we disallow overriding the mainnet config). The config is applied correctly and all nodes are in agreement. We will start some evil nodes,.

— MariusVanDerWijden (@vdWijden) January 23, 2023

This testnet was dubbed Withdrawal-Mainnet-Shadow-Fork-1. It also appeared to simulate the requirements for withdrawing staked Ether (ETH).

A shadow fork is an interim test fork that implements some of the necessary protocol modifications before the full Shanghai hard fork. Before the big switch to a proof-of-stake network, known as the Merge, which occurred last year. Ethereum employed multiple shadow forks for testing.

Vitalik going stealth

Ethereum’s founder and current CEO, Vitalik Buterin, also proposed the implementation of a feature he named “Stealth Addresses.” In an article, while highlighting the difficulty of ensuring privacy in the ecosystem, Buterin stated:

“Fixing this state of affairs is a serious topic.”

Furthermore, Stealth Addresses would be a way to conceal the true ownership of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and domain names registered using the Ethereum Name Service (ENS). Stealth addresses are created by wallets, which scramble public key addresses for anonymous transactions. A unique “spending key” key is required to access these incognito exchanges.

If the Dev team’s shadow fork turned out to be successful, users could withdraw their staked ETH without fear of the network being compromised. The lack of privacy concerns on the Ethereum network might also be solved if Vitalik’s suggested stealth address could be deployed. If these updates increase the network’s popularity, ETH’s value may rise. 

How much are 1,10,100 ETHs worth today?

Development activity decent, but price drops

The Development Activity indicator on Santiment could be used to get an idea of how busy the developers are. As of this writing, the Metric indicated that developer input had nearly reached 50. As the Shanghai update approaches, this may very well climb further. 

On the daily timescale chart, Ethereum traded at about $1,618. In addition, the price continued, the little decline it had been experiencing over the previous 48 hours -until press time – by dropping by almost.50%.

However, it was apparent that the price action was higher than the long and short Moving Averages (blue and yellow lines). The support level was also shown by the yellow and blue lines.