Developer Esc0rtd3w has stated on psxhax that he and a team of developers have been working on an exploit for PS3 4.81. This is PS3’s latest firmware, which remains to be hacked, a year after its release.

This could very well be the last ps3 firmware, and having a hack for it would be pretty good for the scene.

However, Esc0rtd3w has explicitly stated that there was no promise of a release at this point, but that Christmas sounded realistic. Specifically:

since it has been asked in many forms quite a bit, here is a slightly updated path. 1) All console models should be supported for some things, such as Flash Dump, IDPS Extraction, using root lv2 syscalls….and a few others. 2) We have ran into a few issues concerning 300x and 4xxx consoles as far as writing to flash with lv0.2. These models will most likely require another exploit to take full advantage of CFW features like older consoles, and may not have full support upon release. These models may need the community to build upon our current work….this is not fully worked out yet and may be resolved. no promise on release date, but x-mas is a good goal for now