Ethereum London Fork August 3-5, 2021
So as many of you know the highly anticipated London upgrade is now ready to be activated on the Ethereum mainnet. It will go live on block 12 965 000, which is expected between August 3–5, 2021. A lot of questions are floating around and I thought I could attack some them to make things more clear.
The following EIPs are included in the London upgrade:
- EIP-1559: Fee market change for ETH 1.0 chain
- EIP-3198: BASEFEE opcode
- EIP-3529: Reduction in refunds
- EIP-3541: Reject new contracts starting with the 0xEF byte
- EIP-3554: Difficulty Bomb Delay to December 1st 2021
If you use an exchange (such as Coinbase, Kraken, or Binance), a web wallet service (such as Metamask, MyCrypto, or MyEtherWallet), a mobile wallet service (such as Coinbase Wallet, Status.im, or Trust Wallet), or a hardware wallet (such as Ledger, Trezor, or KeepKey) you do not need to do anything unless you are informed to take additional steps by your exchange or wallet service. If you run your own Ethereum node, you will in fact need to upgrade your node.
A network upgrade is a change to the underlying Ethereum protocol, implementing new rules to make the system better. The decentralized nature of blockchain systems makes upgrading the network more difficult. Network upgrades in a blockchain require cooperation and communication with the community as a whole, as well as with the developers of the various Ethereum clients in order for the transition to go smoothly. This is exactly one of the reason I am writing this article, to raise awareness.
After Istanbul the Ethereum team ran out of names for the planned network upgrades. Devcon 1 was in London, after a suggestion to use Devcon city names for the upgradesso the name London came from about.
There will continue to be network upgrades and improvement to the network.
