The "London” hard fork has been activated on 05th August 2021 - A big and necessary changes coming to the code underpinning the world’s second-biggest cryptocurrency.  The blockchain has a long-standing problem with scaling, and its highly unpredictable and sometimes exorbitant transaction fees holding real-world use-cases to be disrupted with FinTech being the most obvious one.

The changes to the code, which has little to do with the city of London, are designed to fix many of these issues by “burning” ether coins,  changes to the workings of transaction fees and making fees more predictable.  As a metaphor, if you think of ethereum like London's Motorways (M25m, M1, M6) London is adding a few lanes to ease the traffic system and standardising toll price (example M6).

- EIP-1559 reduces the variability of transaction fees and introduces a burning mechanism to counterbalance Ethereum inflation. It has already been seen tens of thousands of dollars worth of ETH burned every minute. It's also doubling of the block size.

It also addresses the portion of miner fees to existing token holders.

- $18 billion has so far (as of 06 August 2021) been staked in Eth 2.0 for interest yielding nodes.

- EIP-3554 is included in the Ethereum's London Hardfork too which  paves the way for ethereum 2.0, an upgrade and total overhaul of the system.  EIP-3554 takes an importance for a deadline that will encourage ethereum miners to upgrade in order to prepare for the switching which is known as the “difficulty time bomb” — and aiming to move the deadline from summer 2022 to this December.

- So why London? The ethereum community has simply taken to naming its hard forks after cities where its Devcon international developer’s conference been held.

- Ethereum 2.0 (Beacon Chain) - Improve the network's scalability, security, and shift away from PoW (Proof of Work) to PoS (proof of stake) consensus mechanism.



Can't wait to see the merge of Beacon Chain with Ethereum Mainnet and boost to #fintech, financial innovation and #disruptive business models.  Well this can take sometime, but the wait is worthwhile and hoping Ethereum manages to pull this one off.

#blockchain #ethereum #proofofstake #proofofwork #hardfork#beaconchain #ethereumblockchain
image sources: Consensys