Ethereum underwent an upgrade on Thursday, bringing with it a number of alterations to the network’s blockchain. CEO and founder of MyEtherWallet, Kosala Hemchandra, pointed toward two changes of particular importance.
“The London upgrade adds around 5 changes to the current Ethereum network; however, I believe that only 2 of them are crucial to day-to-day users,” Hemchandra said in comments sent to Cointelegraph. Noting “time bomb delay” as the first of the two, he added:
“Since the inception of Ethereum there was a hard coded value basically responsible to make sure Ethereum will move to PoS or ETH 2.0 on time. This value is responsible for making the block difficulty exponentially hard after a certain block number thus making it impossible for miners to mine new blocks and they have to move to ETH 2 network. However, because of development delays this time bomb kept getting delayed and in the London fork, it’ll be postponed one last time.”
Ethereum has suffered scalability issues in recent years, particularly evident in the high fees present when using decentralized finance, or DeFi, solutions. A long time in the making, Ethereum 2.0, or Eth2, looks to bring scalability to the Ethereum blockchain, which includes shifting to a proof-of-stake, or PoS, consensus mechanism. Eth2’s roadmap officially kicked off in December 2020.
Ethereum’s recent London hard fork included five Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs). One of those proposals, EIP-1559, seeks to giv the blockchain a deflationary effect on its native asset, Ether (ETH). Hemchandra noted EIP-1559 as the second important change brought by the London hard fork.
“EIP 1559 is the highly debated change which, in essence, changes the structure of how Ethereum tx fees are handled,” he said, adding:
“This will bring a couple of major changes, such as burning the transaction fee, which will reduce the increase of overall ETH in circulation. However, since miners will no longer receive the tx fees as an incentive this change was highly debated. This change also brings a tipping mechanism to tip the miners for including your tx, and this tip will go directly to the miner and will not be burned.”