London Hard Fork on Ethereum Now Live

By Liam J. Kelly

Join us Thursday, August 5th at 10AM PT on Twitter Spaces for a discussion on the upcoming EIP-1559 deployment with Decrypt's Jeff Benson, Ethereum 2.0 core engineer Ansgar Dietrichs, and Ethereum Cat Herders Pooja Ranjan and Hudson Jameson.

Ethereum’s London hard fork has just been executed at block number 12965000. 

The fork brings about five key changes to the network, of which the most notable is EIP-1559. 

Though it has been said that EIP-1559 will lower transaction costs on Ethereum, this isn’t perfectly accurate. 

Instead, it will allow users to better estimate how much a transaction actually costs. This means that instead of blindly cushioning a transaction with extra gas to ensure that miners process the transaction, users can be more precise in their estimations—which will likely result in them paying less. 

So, in a sense, it will lower transaction costs. But not quite in the same way that people are thinking about it.

Tim Beiko, a developer with the Ethereum Foundation, also said during The Decrypt Daily podcast that the cost won’t be a “20x reduction,” but rather a “20% reduction.”

EIP-1559 will also usher in what some have called an “ultra-sound” era for Ethereum by destroying a large portion of those pesky mining fees altogether. 

With the London hard fork now live, the transaction costs that were previously paid to miners will now be burned and removed from circulation. The thinking goes among Ethereans, including Beiko, that as more and more Ethereum is removed from circulation, there will be a sort of supply crunch. And as popular sectors within the ecosystem, including decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), create more demand for the cryptocurrency, its price is expected to rise. 

It remains to be seen, however, if the price of Ethereum rises because of this or simply because of this meme’s efficacy on crypto Twitter.

Even before the fork, Ethereum enjoyed a hefty price hike from roughly $2,444 to $2,725. At press time, it's trading at 2,626, up 3.9%

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