Shanghai Upgrade Accelerates the Divergence Between Bitcoin and Ethereum
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Shanghai Upgrade Accelerates the Divergence Between Bitcoin and Ethereum
Bitcoin is evolving from weak consensus to a strong "digital gold" consensus, better protecting people from the harms of inflation.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsBitcoin is evolving from weak consensus to a strong "digital gold" consensus, better protecting people against inflation. Its core spirit of pursuing fairness and freedom continues to inspire a steady stream of developers to join the industry, yet Bitcoin cannot support complex logic through smart contracts like Ethereum can.
Ethereum inherits Bitcoin's ideals—innovating within tradition and developing through innovation—striving to build an entirely new world where everyone can participate fairly.
The Growing Divergence Between Ethereum and Bitcoin
Bitcoin’s position is already established, but Ethereum cannot afford to stand still—this stems from their fundamentally different goals and design philosophies.
Satoshi Nakamoto envisioned creating a decentralized electronic payment system to address fundamental flaws in the current international financial and monetary system. Bitcoin carries the mission of payments and has taken on the role of “digital gold” in the development of the crypto industry—holding BTC is like holding gold: for value preservation, risk hedging, and inflation resistance. Ethereum absorbed Bitcoin’s effective designs and ideals, adding innovations such as smart contracts, aiming to establish a programmable, Turing-complete blockchain development platform.
In the early stages of industry development, the differences between the two were not obvious. However, with the continuous advancement of Ethereum’s upgrade roadmap, the divergence between Bitcoin and Ethereum has accelerated, making Ethereum’s role as a “decentralized global computer” increasingly clear.
After nine long years of effort, Ethereum has achieved absolute dominance in the public chain sector, giving birth to tens of thousands of DApps and enabling rich new narratives including DeFi, NFTs, the metaverse, DAOs, and Web3, with a current market capitalization reaching $200 billion.
Moving Forward: Ethereum’s Foundation Lies in Scaling
Despite its significant success, breakthroughs are constrained by the “impossible trinity” theory—security, decentralization, and scalability cannot all be maximized simultaneously. Both Ethereum and Bitcoin face low transaction processing capacity, but compared to Bitcoin’s “digital gold” role, Ethereum’s identity as a “global computer” makes its need for scaling even more urgent.
Ethereum sacrificed “efficiency” to prioritize security and decentralization, resulting in a network that is both expensive and congested. Currently, its bandwidth is only about 15 TPS—far behind VISA’s 24,000 transactions per second—and falls short of infrastructure performance demands for large-scale adoption. This lack of scalability has become a major bottleneck in Ethereum’s development, which is why it is determined to transition to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) mechanism.
Like leveling up in a game, Ethereum’s development roadmap includes four phases—Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, and Serenity—to achieve its goal of becoming a “world computer.” The first three phases belong to Ethereum 1.0, while the final phase marks Ethereum 2.0. Each phase includes multiple upgrades incorporating various EIP proposals. To avoid misleading users, the Ethereum Foundation later dropped the terms “Ethereum 1.0” and “2.0,” replacing them with “execution layer” and “consensus layer.”
The ultimate goal of Ethereum 2.0 is to scale, reduce costs, and improve efficiency—a process that requires time and includes multiple upgrade stages: The Merge, The Surge, The Scourge, The Verge, The Purge, and The Splurge. Key milestones already achieved include the launch of the Beacon Chain mainnet on December 1, 2020, marking the official start of Ethereum 2.0; the Paris Upgrade on September 15, 2022, signifying the successful completion of the Merge and the transition from PoW to PoS, officially ending the mining era; and the upcoming Shanghai Upgrade, scheduled for March this year, which will be the first major upgrade post-Merge.
The Shanghai Upgrade and New Staking Opportunities
Although the Shanghai Upgrade includes numerous core EIP proposals, EIP-4895 remains the focal point—it enables the unlocking of staked ETH.
After Ethereum 2.0 shifted from PoW to PoS, users can now stake ETH to become network validators and earn stable returns of approximately 5–8%. ETH staking has grown rapidly, with over 16.98 million ETH staked and 530,000 validators, significantly enhancing Ethereum’s network security and scalability.
Compared to other PoS chains with staking ratios of 40–70%, Ethereum’s current ratio of just 15% indicates substantial room for growth. Liquid staking could become one of the core narratives in the crypto industry this year. For users looking to enter Ethereum staking, how should they choose the right staking solution? The market currently offers four main models: native solo staking, staking-as-a-service, pooled staking, and centralized exchange-based staking—each with distinct advantages and drawbacks.
Solo Staking is the official gold standard, offering full participation rewards and complete decentralization. However, it requires high entry barriers: a dedicated computer running 24/7 connected to the internet and at least 32 ETH locked up, along with challenges related to hardware maintenance and private key management.
Staking-as-a-Service separates ETH staking from hardware management. Users can deposit 32 ETH via third-party operators without dealing with unfamiliar hardware, paying only a service fee. However, this introduces risks such as malicious operator behavior, which could lead to validator penalties—including loss of staked ETH. Additionally, the high capital threshold remains unresolved.
Pooled Staking resolves many issues of the previous two models. It eliminates hardware hassles and lowers the financial barrier, allowing users who don’t have or don’t want to stake 32 ETH to participate flexibly. Moreover, leading liquid staking providers like Lido further enhance ETH liquidity and capital efficiency. However, pooled staking isn’t perfect—being a third-party platform, it introduces centralization risks.
Centralized Exchanges operate similarly to pooled staking, but offer users simpler, more professional, and flexible staking services. Leading legacy crypto exchanges like OKX continue launching ETH2.0 staking campaigns and unlocking BETH-related product features. These services feature low thresholds, flexible participation options, and zero commission or staking fees for ETH2.0 staking.
OKX is among the few exchanges offering free ETH2.0 staking, covering all costs for node setup and maintenance, charging no commissions or staking fees, and passing 100% of on-chain staking rewards directly to users. OKX Mining Pool ensures node security with 24/7 operations, safeguarding user assets.
Through the OKX ETH2.0 Staking page, users can stake ETH with one click and receive BETH tokens at a 1:1 ratio, earning daily on-chain staking rewards. The minimum entry threshold on OKX is as low as 0.01 ETH—just 1/3200 of the native 32 ETH requirement—dramatically lowering the financial barrier for users.
During users’ participation in ETH2.0 staking, OKX has enhanced trading and lending experiences: On March 2, 2023, OKX adjusted the discount rate for BETH in cross-currency margin accounts, and on March 22, 2023, began supporting BETH as collateral in flexible multi-currency lending, reducing trading costs and improving capital efficiency. Additionally, OKX supports spot trading of BETH, allowing users to sell anytime.
After the Shanghai Upgrade, Ethereum will enable withdrawal functionality. The OKX ETH2.0 Staking page will allow users to redeem their staked assets, converting BETH back to ETH at a 1:1 ratio. Furthermore, to celebrate the Ethereum Shanghai Upgrade and thank users for supporting BETH, OKX Earn is launching a major airdrop campaign—stay tuned for updates.
In summary, users can choose the staking service that best fits their needs. However, when opting for centralized exchange services, they must exercise caution and prefer reputable platforms like OKX, where user asset security is well protected.
Dream Big, Stay Grounded
The Shanghai Upgrade may bring short-term price volatility, but Ethereum’s future is undoubtedly vast and promising. As the world’s largest public blockchain, Ethereum has fully unlocked the imagination of the crypto world—the 2017 ICO bull run and the 2020 DeFi/NFT boom both originated here.
Dream big, stay grounded. With the continued progress of Ethereum 2.0, the long-standing issues of high cost and low efficiency are expected to be resolved through a series of upgrades, paving the way for mass commercial adoption.
Bitcoin and Ethereum represent two successful forms of blockchain technology application. Built upon rigorous mathematical logic, they have created an extremely transparent and open world, each growing steadily from their respective ideals—yet sometimes delivering unexpected surprises. For instance, Bitcoin is breaking stereotypes as NFTs gain popularity. OKX NFT Marketplace has launched the first authenticated Bitcoin Ordinal NFT collection, Bitcoin Punks, allowing users to freely trade BTC NFTs using ETH or other ERC20 tokens, avoiding fake NFTs or asset losses from private transactions. Meanwhile, Ethereum proceeds in a surprisingly orderly fashion with the Shanghai Upgrade.
As Google’s chief economist Hal Varian once said, you must be unique and rare to resist commoditization. The greatest uniqueness of Bitcoin and Ethereum lies in their independence from centralized control—their future will be shaped by community consensus, shaped by you, me, and all of us together.
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