The highly anticipated Ethereum London hard fork upgrade has finally happened on the Ethereum network. The London hard fork arrived almost on schedule at 13:33 pm Nigerian time today at block height 12,965,000, ushering in the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559.
What you should know
- With this new upgrade, Ethereum will now undergo a significant overhaul of the network’s gas (transaction) fee and other parameters such as gas fee refunds.
- With the upgrade, each transaction on Ethereum will involve burning the base fee, which automatically decreases the Ether (ETH) circulating supply, making the Ethereum token deflationary like the Binance native token, BNB.
- As a result of the upgrade, several exchanges, including Binance, announced a temporary pause to deposit and withdrawals on the Ethereum network due to the London hard fork so as to avoid instances of incomplete transactions as a result of the transitionary network upgrade.
- Ethereum co-founder and ConsenSys founder, Joseph Lubin described the London upgrade as a part of a journey toward making Ether become “ultrasound money.” The London upgrade and the subsequent activation of EIP-1559 is all part of the transitionary process the Ethereum network is undertaking to move into Ethereum 2.0, which will move the network from a Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus.
Bottomline
Ethereum investors now turn their attention to the Shanghai hard fork upgrade scheduled to happen later in the year. Due to the anticipation of the London hard fork upgrade, the price of Ethereum has turned bullish, currently up approximately 20% in the last 7 days according to coinmarketcap.
The Ethereum network native token, Ether, is currently trading close to the $3,000 trading zone, currently at $2,820, as of the time of writing this report. Ether clocked an all-time high above $4,200 back in May right before the cryptocurrency market crashed, which saw Bitcoin (BTC) lose almost 50% of its value and altcoins declining even more.