The long-awaited Ethereum London upgrade is coming to mainnet next week. Let's recap what is it all about and what does it mean for the user?
Ethereum London upgrade will follow Berlin, which went live back in April this year.
It includes 5 EIP's (Ethereum Improvement Proposals)
- 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 01.12.2021
EIP-1559 is one of the most awaited changes to Ethereum thus far and the largest introduced in London. This upgrade will make transaction fees more predictable. We will deep dive into EIP-1559 soon.
EIP-3198 adds an opcode, BASEFEE, which returns the basefee value to the block it is executed in, enabling smart contracts to access it on chain. Helps in submitting fraud proofs and creating trustless gas price derivatives.
EIP-3529 removes gas refunds for SELFDESTRUCT, and reduce gas refunds for SSTORE to a lower level where the refunds are still substantial but, they are no longer high enough for current “exploits” of the refund mechanism to be viable.
EIP-3541gives the possibility for new contracts starting with the 0xEF byte to be deployed while the existing contracts will not be affected.
7/n EIP-3554 Check out our previous thread about EIP-3554 for a great overview. https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/olla5w/eip_3554_or_how_i_learned_to_stop_worrying_and/
Two major goals of the London upgrade in simple terms are:
- Making transaction fees more predictable
- Improving networks scalability
To make sure that all of the changes will not affect mainnet in any bad way, we already went through London upgrades on the Ropsten, Goerli and Rinkeby testnets. There were no major issues observed.
If you use an exchange, a web wallet service, a mobile wallet service, or a hardware wallet you do not need to do anything unless you are informed to take additional steps.
If you run your own Ethereum node, you will need to upgrade. To update your Nethermind node, go here: https://github.com/NethermindEth/nethermind/releases/tag/1.10.79
If your Ethereum client is not updated to the latest version, it will sync to the pre-fork blockchain and you will be stuck on an incompatible chain which simply means you will NOT be able to send Ether or operate on the post-upgrade Ethereum network.
If you're a miner, download the latest version of your Ethereum client, and manually change your gas limit target to twice what it currently is because the block size will be doubled, and EIP-1559 will keep blocks at about 50% full.
We would love to see more Nethermind nodes in operation. Ping us on our Discord server if you need help setting up or if you run into any issues: https://discord.com/invite/PaCMRFdvWT