Ethereum’s London hard fork goes live

The London hard fork occurred on the Ethereum mainnet at block #12,965,000.

5 August 2021 | 17:13Update:

Within an hour and a half since activation of London, network participants burned more than 400 ETH. The average gas price in the network of the second-largest cryptocurrency rose twofold, to 85 Gwei, according to Etherscan.

According to CoinGecko, in the last hour the asset price rose by 8%, to $2,770.

London implements five proposals to improve the Ethereum network (EIPs):

• EIP-3554 — postpones the activation of the \”difficulty bomb\” until December 1, 2021;
• EIP-3541 — forbids deployment of new smart contracts whose addresses start with the byte 0xEF.
• EIP-3529 — reduces gas refunds;
• EIP-3198 — defines the opcode that returns the base fee of the block in which it is executed;
• EIP-1559 — proposes burning a portion of transaction fees depending on network load and reducing volatility of gas prices.

divided miners into two camps.

Its opponents, including controlling 43.9% of the network’s hashrate, SparkPool and Ethermine, wanted to concentrate in the latter more than 51% of hashing power. However their attempt failed.

According to Compass, activating EIP-1559 will reduce miners’ revenue by 20-30%. The proposal will raise the share of proceeds from mining blocks, and the decrease in transaction fees will offset the rise in the cryptocurrency’s price.

Developer Tim Beiko explained that with London the gas limit in Ethereum doubled — this is evident from the Goerli testnet, which underwent the July update. It is expected in practice that the value will not exceed 50% of the cap, which miners should aim for to maintain the same network throughput.

BUT, then miners need to keep the new gas limit (which we expect to be ~50% filled on average) if we want to maintain the same throughput on the chain.

— Tim Beiko | timbeiko.eth ☀️ (@TimBeiko) August 4, 2021

Beiko also offered several tips on calculating tips that can now be paid to miners to prioritise time-dependent transactions. He said that because the value miners can extract (miner extractable value) varies widely, the process is fairly complex, though in the future it will be abstracted into an API.

Second big topic is the priority fee/tip and how high it should be. In short, this value pays miners for the extra risk of having their block uncled when including your transactions. Bigger blocks -> slower to propagate on the network -> higher uncle risk.

— Tim Beiko | timbeiko.eth ☀️ (@TimBeiko) August 4, 2021

According to Ethernodes, at the time of the hard fork with the update, 78% of nodes were compatible. London supports the following versions of popular Ethereum clients:

From now on, the codebase of the OpenEthereum client, used by more than 14% of nodes, is considered obsolete. The Gnosis team, behind the project’s development, has terminated its support and recommended users move to the Erigon client.

Even before London activation, developers warned of a \”small mathematical error\” in EIP-1559 that does not guarantee access for all nodes to the upgrade. Infura, an infrastructure provider, notified of an emergency patch designed to fix this issue.

Not only are we ready for the London fork in a few hours, we’ve also rolled out a hotfix to our infrastructure which will protect our users from the issue described below! Thanks to @lightclients and @gregthegreek for flagging it. If your wallet is using Infura, you’re good to go https://t.co/7jTFyvV7V4

— E.G. Galano (@egalano) August 4, 2021

Earlier, developer Martin Holst Svende discovered another vulnerability in EIP-1559, which could lead to blockchain overload. He noted that the proposal does not set limits on the maximum amount of such payments. As a result, an attacker could inject an absurdly large number to overload the network, even if they do not have funds to pay.

ForkLog’s experts interviewed said they disagreed on London’s impact on the prices of the two cryptocurrencies. Some believe that the reduction in ETH supply will positively affect the asset’s price, while others expect the network to face selling pressure.

In the last 24 hours, Ethereum’s price rose by 3.9%, according to CoinGecko. At the time of writing the asset was trading around $2,600.

London became the second Ethereum hard fork in 2021. In April the Berlin activation took place, which changed the gas-cost calculation algorithm and introduced new transaction types. After the upgrade, the network recorded a problem with node synchronization with OpenEthereum 3.2.1.

In an interview with Decrypt, Beiko called failures during London’s activation ‘extremely unlikely’.

«Regarding whether the upgrade will work as intended, I would say that it\’s extremely unlikely that it won\’t. We conducted a technical and economic audit of the EIP, carried out extensive testing, and confirmed that it works on Ethereum test networks as well as on other blockchains», he said.

According to Joseph Lubin, head of ConsenSys and co-founder of the second cryptocurrency, Ethereum will become the \’economy of the next generation\’ and will be orders of magnitude larger than a \’narrow monetary system\’.

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