Ethereum London Upgrade with EIP-1559 Set to Be Released on July 14th

The London hard fork, which will include the much-awaited EIP 1559 that will burn the fees paid in Ether, can come as early as July 14th, a rough timeline decided in today’s Ethereum Core Devs Meeting.

“TL;DR: client teams prefer a tighter-scoped London upgrade, London in July would be best, and if we keep London small + the Merge work goes according to plan, we should be able to do another feature fork this fall without delaying the merge,” noted Ethereum Foundation contractor Tim Beiko.

It was the anticipation and excitement around EIP 1559 making Ether “a deflationary asset” that sent the prices of ETH to a new all-time high of $2,600 on Thursday and a 3-year high against BTC. BTC -0.27% Bitcoin / USD BTCUSD $ 26,366.23
-$71.19-0.27% Volume 10.88 b Change -$71.19 Open $26,366.23 Circulating 19.4 m Market Cap 511.45 b 1 y SEC Commissioner says NFTs Might Fall Within Their Jurisdiction, Gensler Hires Senate Aid for Crypto Policy 1 y A Possible Crypto Recovery Moving Into New Year, Risk-on Sentiments Send The Stock Market to Another Record High 1 y Bitcoin and Ether Dump More Going Into Year-End, ETH Killers Showing Great Momentum

This is why during today’s sell-off, Ether only went to $2,060 and is recovering well, already above $2,300.

Now, the increase in buy pressure and supply shock is set to become a reality for the second-largest cryptocurrency.

During the call, the developers decided to keep the upgrade lean with mid-July aimed for deployment. In parallel, they will be working on the merge of Ethereum and ETH 2.0 and ship it as soon as possible.

They have also decided on another small feature fork, Shanghai, which will include whatever was missed in London.

The off-schedule meeting was focused on the planning for the London Upgrade, which will contain EIP 1559, EIP 3198 (BASEFEE opcode), and EIP 3238 (Ice Age pushback).

While the Ice Age push back was scheduled for Q2 2022, because either the merge or Shanghai will be shipped this year, devs have decided to make the bomb go off sooner, in December, as a forcing function.

This upgrade is likely to lead a to-be-created EIP that addresses the refunds issue, which will be discussed in the next devs call, happening one week from now on April 30th, 14:00 UTC.

This to be created EIP proposes to remove refunds from SSTORE and SELFDESTRUCT. Because refunds can increase block gas consumption, and EIP 1559 does too, limiting them in London was brought up as a security concern previously.

Completely disabling refunds is a very large breaking change and was already rejected; as such, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and coder M H Swende are working on a new proposal that lower gas refunds from SSTORE from 15k to 4.8k gas, whose EIP will be formally created next week.