The Ethereum core developers have confirmed the scheduled Shanghai (Shapella) upgrade of the Ethereum network to take place on April 12, 2023. It will allow for ETH that are currently staked to be unstaked.
The Merge is the first step to a series of upgrades formerly known as ETH 2.0. The Merge is the biggest upgrade to Ethereum ever since its conception in 2015 and will switch its consensus mechanism from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake
Funding and withdrawing USDC just got that much faster (and WAY cheaper) now that you can make USDC transfers using Solana.
You can bid slow transfers goodbye, and say hello to low fees. Matic (MATIC) and Fantom (FTM) are now supported on their native networks with Newton.
Ripple (XRP) will undergo a fork to accommodate the Flare network's new Spark (SPARK) token. SPARK won't be supported on Newton in the future or credited to XRP holders on Newton, and XRP support will be paused during the fork.