Ethereum’s London Hard Fork Enters The Final Stages: Report

Ethereum’s London hard fork that will include EIP-1559 is entering its final stages, hoping to lower the amount of ETH miners receive so let’s read more in our latest Ethereum news today.

Ethereum’s London hard fork should be ready in July and it will hit the Ropsten testnet next week. The London Hard fork is a scheduled upgrade to the Ethereum network that is making its way to the blockchain test networks. Tim Beiko of the ETH Foundation announced that London will go live on the Ropsten testnet at the end of June followed by Goerli and Rinkeby. The blog noted:

“Once the upgrade has successfully been activated on these networks, a block will be set for the Ethereum mainnet.”

London is now finally ready to hit testnets 🇬🇧🎉

Next week, Ropsten, will upgrade, followed by Goerli & Rinkeby the weeks after.

Read this to find out how to prepare for the upgrade & expect another announcement when a mainnet block is chosen 😄https://t.co/tq0Hq56MxV

— Tim Beiko | timbeiko.eth 🦇🔊 (@TimBeiko) June 18, 2021

The London upgrade will implement five separate Ethereum improvement proposals which are a change to the blockchain code that has to be agreed upon by community members before they can be adopted. The most controversial change is EIP-1559 that was created by Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin which will alter how network fees work and how miners process the transactions and mint new ETH. Every time that someone makes a transaction or interacts with a smart contract on Ethereum, they have to decide on the fees which are more or less a guessing game. To push through the transaction fast, you will set a high fee all but the ensuring miners will then include it in a block. If you lowball it, the transaction will likely wait until miners are less busy processing the higher transactions. Speed is quite important in a few instances including when trading upon ETH-based DEXs like Uniswap traders lose money if they wait a lot.

“This implies that most of the time, blocks will have an ‘extra’ 100% of their capacity that they can fill with transactions. So, as long as a transaction is sent with a fee higher than the BASE FEE and includes a tip for the miner, it will be included in the next handful of blocks.”

The added transparency is billed as an improvement to user experience and some miners claim that it is harshing up their experience. Under the EIP-1559 the base fee is burnt rather than going to the miners. The goal here is to turn ETH which doesn’t have a supply limit like BTC into a deflationary asset. Less ETH in circulation will be good for the miners because it can increase the demand and the exchange price for ETH so the miners will get rewards every time they create a new block.

Source: https://www.dcforecasts.com/ethereum-news/ethereums-london-hard-fork-enters-the-final-stages-report/