One of the year’s most highly anticipated events, the Ethereum (ETH) London hard fork, finally has a new launch date (tentatively). Although many expected it to happen in the summer, it now looks like August is the new date for the launch.
The hard fork, which is also referred to as the EIP-1559, is an upgrade that the entire crypto community has been expecting for a long time. Ethereum is 2nd only to Bitcoin (BTC), and many believe that it actually has the potential and the capability to eventually replace Bitcoin as the world’s dominant crypto in the future.
All eyes on August
A significant factor that contributed towards forming a bullish catalyst for Ethereum is indeed the aforementioned London hard fork. Simply put, this refers to a key infrastructure upgrade to Ethereum’s network, which is something that investors have desired for several months now.
The upgrade shall involve five critical EIP upgrades. However, the main attraction is indeed the EIP-1559, an aspect that is often considered to be extremely controversial in nature due to the idea of it being able to transform ETH into that of the deflationary token. This is the very 1st time in Ethereum’s history that this could happen, and it will presumably be done by having the base fee be burned, which in turn is also expected to decrease the revenue for miners.
Simply put, the EIP-1559 shall do away with Ethereum’s model of the ‘1st price auction fee’ and shall replace it with a new base fee which may be adjusted in accordance with demand. Ultimately, the goal is to cause a drastic reduction in the gas prices for all of Ethereum’s users, as ridiculously high fees have been a major problem in the past.
Are the delays over?
As abovementioned, the EIP-1559 had been expected to arrive in the middle of the summer, sometime towards the end of the 2nd week of July. Unfortunately, there were delays, and certain enthusiasts now believe that further delays may not be out of the question yet.
The London upgrade had been launched on the 24th of June upon the Ropsten testnet before being eventually deployed on the Goerli testnet not long afterward. The new final launch date had thus been decided following the success of these two testnets in particular. The hard fork has not yet been activated on the Kovan and Rinkeby testnets, however.