Ethereum Presents London Hard Fork To Fix High Transaction Fees On Its Network

JAKARTA – Ethereum (ETH) will receive an update to address high transaction fees by introducing a London hard fork. Reportedly, the London hard fork has been tested on the Ropsten and Goerli testnets. The hard fork will also be released on the Rinkeby testnet soon.

If the update has passed the trial stage, Ethereum developers will immediately determine a launch date. According to rumors circulating, the hard fork will be launched no later than the end of July or August at the latest.

For information, the London hard fork is a protocol update to regulate transaction fees (gas fees) to be lower on the Ethereum network. This protocol upgrade is what many people have been waiting for. Because this update will be able to reduce transaction fees on the Ethereum network which were previously known to be too high.

Referring to the “Etherum Improvement Proposals” (EIPs), there will be five code changes in the London hard fork, the most important of which is EIP-1559.

“[EIP 1559] introduced changes to block headers, added new transaction types, and changed user behavior in several areas (mining, transactions, and others). It is highly recommended that projects familiarize themselves with this EIP”, said Tim Beiko of the Ethereum Foundation.

EIP-1559 will change the gas fee in Ethereum 1.0. EIP-1559 is a code that is intended to fix gas fees that were previously expensive and seem blind to become decreased and more regular. The EIP-1559 proposal is also an upgrade to Ethereum's 'burn' gas fee. The act of burning or burning is usually able to increase the value of the cryptocurrency.

This update may be part of the Ethereum gas fee revamp before switching to a consensus mechanism from Proof of Work (PoW) to the new, more efficient consensus, Proof of Stake (PoS) with the introduction of Ethereum 2.0.