Here is what we need to know about.
The much-hyped Ethereum’s latest “London” hard fork upgrade has been officially activated. What’s more awaiting is the software upgrade, EIP 1559 which means necessary changes in the code in the world’s second-biggest cryptocurrency.
The Ethereum network has gone through several upgrades in the past, the London hard fork has received more media attention than any other previous upgrades.
The issues that blockchain has like scaling and the unpredictable transaction fee has always been a matter of annoyance o the Ethereum users which became even worse as the interest in NFT increased which largely uses Ethereum blockchain.
So, here, with the activation of London, there are many likely changes in the way transaction fees work and also fix many other issues by destroying or “burning” ether coins. ‘London’ is there to control the traffic with an increased number of Ethereum users.
Nic Carter, Castle Island Ventures general partner and Coin Metrics co-founder said, “It adds a lot of complexity to the fee logic, but it’s an interesting approach that could potentially stabilize the fee dynamics.”
Although the London hard fork seems to be exciting it also is accompanied by risks into uncharted territory. If there are incompatible upgrades in the distributed computers, also known as “nodes”, it can cause a chain split and disrupt block production on Ethereum. When the London hard fork was tested on the Ropsten testnet, a miner using Geth, the most popular Ethereum software client, approves a faulty transaction, which led to a temporary chain split. But, to address the issue, Ethereum developers and clients have worked together to make sure such bugs do not appear on the main network. Also to keep a track of the blockchain and keep a check on chain splits in real-time, the stakeholders can use node monitoring websites like forkmon.
The activation of ‘London’ will affect all the users and stakeholders of the Ethereum network one way or the other. This is in context with the users will now have a new fee market that will change the transactions and add predictability to transaction fees that were highly unpredictable previously.
Another change that is most likely to set a major transformation is that will make it harder for miners to earn money. As the ether which otherwise went to the miner will now be ‘burned’ that eventually destroys a portion of the digital currency. Miners can still sell their computing power to the network and hope to earn a reward of newly minted either or receive tips from users looking to prioritize their position within the block but still won’t be making as much as they made before the London hard fork.
As for the name, London, unlike its name, has no relation with the actual city London, but the name is kept after the city name where its Devcon international developer’s conference was held.
Read more about the history of Ethereum upgrades at https://ethereum.org/en/history/#london
