Key Ethereum testnets successfully upgrade to London

The London hard fork has been activated on the major Ethereum test networks. Developer Tim Beiko said.

And we are live 😁🇬🇧 https://t.co/a5blKgbZym

All three testnets have now successfully upgraded to London 🎉

Note: because of OpenEthereum being deprecated after London, a block hasn’t been set for Kovan yet, and it will likely upgrade after mainnet. https://t.co/rCnLDMjxZj

— Tim Beiko | timbeiko.eth 🦇🔊 (@TimBeiko) July 8, 2021

Ropsten and Goerli testnets upgraded on June 24 and June 30, respectively; Rinkeby on July 8. Beiko noted that, due to issues with the OpenEthereum client, which will be deprecated after London, the Kovan hard fork is likely to be activated after mainnet.

The London upgrade includes the controversial EIP-1559, which proposes burning a portion of transaction fees and helps reduce gas-price volatility.

The proposal has gained support from developers and users, but divided miners into two camps. Its opponents wanted to concentrate more than 51% of the network’s hashing power in the Ethermine pool more than 51% of the network’s hashing power, but their attempt failed.

London will be the second hard fork in Ethereum to address miner-related fee issues. In mid-April 2021, the mainnet of the second cryptocurrency activated the Berlin upgrade, which included two EIPs aimed at changing gas pricing.

Activation of Berlin led to changes in opcode prices, reducing the likelihood of DoS attacks and the cost of some operations. The latter is true only when working with precompiled contracts, since some actions with existing opcodes have risen in price.

Meanwhile, EIP-2929 increased the cost of SLOAD and several other opcodes requiring disk access, by almost threefold.

After Berlin activation, Ethereum miners’ revenues in May reached a record $2.39 billion. However in June the figure fell by 53% and amounted to $1.1 billion. This is due to a sharp drop in transaction fee revenues, which decreased from $1.04 billion to $165.8 million.

The average gas price on the Ethereum network sits at about 27 Gwei (~$1.04), according to Etherscan. At the same time, the most resource-intensive activity is on the decentralized exchange Uniswap and transactions with the stablecoin USDT.

According to The Block, for the first week of July Ethereum miners earned $247.76 million, of which $38.1 million came from transaction fees.

As of writing, the second cryptocurrency trades at around $2,175. Over the last 24 hours, the asset’s price has fallen 8.5%, according to CoinGecko.

Beiko proposed activating London on the mainnet at block #12965000, expected on August 4.

Read ForkLog’s Bitcoin news in our Telegram — news, prices and analysis.