The Ethereum London Hard fork is now live.
The hard fork took place on 5 August at 12.33 pm UTC on Thursday at a block height of 12,965,000. The fork enabled Ethereum Improvement proposal [EIP] 1559, a proposal that has been a contentious proposal, to begin with.
The update is also one of the most important ones for the network as it will bring significant changes to transaction fees and gas refunds. This will be possible thanks to EIP 1559 which will involve burning the base fee and reducing Ethers’ total number in circulation.
The network has faced multiple issues from gas fees to scaling in the past, but this would help relieve some pressure on the network. According to Castle Island Ventures’ Nic Carter,
“It adds a lot of complexity to the fee logic, but it’s an interesting approach that could potentially stabilize the fee dynamics.”
EIP-1559 and….?
Apart from EIP 1559, the upgrade also contains five more EIPs that have also been deployed. These include EIPs 3554, 3529, 3198, and 3541, each of which is aimed at improving the Ethereum network’s user experiences and value proposition. While 1559 works on the gas and transaction fees issues, 3554 delays the “difficulty bomb” coded to make mining more difficult.
Meanwhile, 3529 will reduce gas refunds used to incentivize developers to reduce or delete unused smart contracts and addresses on the network. The implementation of 3529 will make some tokens like Chi and GST2 obsolete due to their low benefits and the fact that they eat up a lot of space.
EIP 3541 will require new smart contracts to be different machine codes than the existing 0xEF. Finally, EIP 3198 will help Ethereum client computers acquire the current value of the base fee.
As Ethereum heads on a new journey, users may want to pay attention to the chain for a potential chain split. Especially if a significant group of miners, exchanges, and other network stakeholders don’t upgrade their nodes. It’s worth noting, however, that at this time, this is a very unlikely possibility.
