Ethereum London Hard Fork Goes Live

The highly-anticipated ‘London’ upgrade has finally happened on the Ethereum network as ETH arguably moves closer to becoming a deflationary asset.

The London hard fork arrived almost on schedule at 12:11:33 pm UTC on Thursday at block height 12,965,000, ushering in the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (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.”

ETH has rebounded strongly from the initial dip after the London hard fork…

The London upgrade and the subsequent activation of EIP-1559 is a mile marker of sorts in the transition to Ethereum 2.0, which will move the network from a proof-of-work consensus to a proof-of-stake consensus.