The London upgrade is scheduled for this week, and it could change the future of Ethereum
Ethereum Foundation has announced the London upgrade scheduled to start this week on testnets.
London upgrade to go live on three testnests- Ropsten, Goerli, and Rinkeby.
The London upgrade will be deployed on the Ethereum testnets before the end of this week. Ethereum Foundation revealed the details of the London upgrade in an announcement on the 18th of June. According to the announcement, the long-awaited London upgrade is scheduled for the 24th of June. Tim Beiko of Ethereum Foundation also talked about the London upgrade in a recent tweet.
Ethereum Foundation announces London upgrade
Initially, the London upgrade will go live on Ropsten, at block 1,049,9401 before the end of this week. After, the upgrade will go live on Goerli and Rinkeby. Upon successful activation of the update on the three networks, the blog post revealed that a block would be set for the Ethereum mainnet, which will be announced later.
After the release of the London upgrade on Ropsten, it will also go live on the Goerli network at block 5,062,605 on the 30th of June. After that, the London upgrade will go live on the Rinkeby network at block 8,897,988 on the 7th of July.
Node operators must upgrade the client version that they currently run to be more compatible with the London upgrade. Speaking to node operators, Ethereum developers stated:
"Ethereum node operators should upgrade their nodes prior to the fork block on the networks they want to participate in. Due to block time variability, it is recommended to update several days before the expected date."
To this effect, the Ethereum Foundation has listed the links to the upgraded client version. The links are available for go-ethereum (geth), Nethermind, Erigon (f.k.a. TurboGeth), Besu, OpenEthereum (f.k.a. Parity), and EthereumJS VM.
London upgrade’s EIPs
The upgrade will come with five Ethereum Improvements (EIPs), including EIP-1559: Fee market change for ETH 1.0 chain and EIP-3198: BASEFEE opcode. Others are EIP-3529: Reduction in refunds, EIP-3541: Reject new contracts starting with the 0xEF byte, and EIP: 3554: Difficulty Bomb Delay to December 1st, 2021.
Ethereum Foundation highlighted that EIP-1559 brings some changes to the block header, introduces a new type of transaction, includes new JSON RPC endpoints, and changes behavior clients in different sectors such as transaction pool, mining, and more.
Furthermore, EIP-1559 addresses the increasing gas fees in Ethereum. The EIP adopts standard charges managed by algorithms on the network. As a result, the fees rise during a busy market and fall when the market is open.
EIP-1559 is positioned to trigger an increase in Ethereum (ETH) value as it will reduce the supply of ETH. In addition, with the EIP, part of the fees previously paid to miners will be burned instead of sending them to miners.
At the time of writing, ETH is down 8.30 percent to $2,016. The second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap has also lost more than 8 percent in the last 24 hours. However, ETH has surged nearly 39 percent in its trading volume over the last 24 hours.