The next update of the Ethereum network is coming soon. Thus, the London hard fork and the EIPs that compose it have just entered the last phase before the deployment, namely the testnets.
London deployed on Ropsten
Ethereum is a protocol that evolves continuously. So, after the Berlin update last April, it is London’s turn to be at the doors of the mainnet. On June 24th, Tim Beiko, Head of Development, announced that the London hard fork had been successfully deployed on the Ropsten testnet.
After Ropsten, London will be deployed and tested on the Goerli testnet on June 30th, then Rinkeby on July 7th, before finally being deployed on the mainnet at the end of July.
The hard fork London is composed of 4 EIPs (Ethereum improvment proposals). Obviously, among these EIPs, the most expected is the EIP-1559 that we have already discussed many times.
The EIP 1559: the destruction of fees
Probably the most anticipated of the list, this EIP will lead to a change in the fee system on Ethereum. Without going into detail, it will make fees more predictable from one block to the next, without actually decreasing them. In addition, it will introduce the destruction of part of the transaction fees, aiming to make ETH deflationary.
The EIP 3198: the base fee
As we have seen, EIP 1559 will modify the fee system. It introduces the notion of “base fee”, which corresponds to the basic fees necessary to complete the transaction. EIP 3198 adds functionality to retrieve the current value of the base fee in Solidity.
The EIP 3554: the additional delay of the Bomb difficulty
EIP 3554 adds an additional delay to the “difficulty bomb” until December 2021. As a reminder, the difficulty bomb mechanism aims to gradually increase the difficulty of mining on Ethereum to force miners to abandon Ethereum 1.0 in favor of Ethereum 2.0.
The EIP 3529: the blocking of gas tokens
Finally, the EIP 3529 removes the 2 functions Solidity, SELFDESTRUCT and SSTORE which allowed until now to refund spent gas. It is in particular via these 2 functions that the gas tokens, like the CHI, worked.
The first results of the testnet
As we have just seen, the EIP 1559 leads to a destruction of part of the transaction fees.
This mechanism can be observed on the Ropsten testnet where 88,571 ETH have been destroyed since its launch. Remember that these ETH are specific to the testnet and have no value!
On the other hand, the number of validators on the Ethereum 2.0 network continues to increase. It is about to exceed 6 million ETH deposited, only one month after the 5 million mark.
