Hopes are high as Ethereum’s EIP-1559 upgrade is penciled for July

Ethereum’s much-anticipated EIP-1559 upgrade (aka the fee market upgrade) is set to launch in mid-July.

Tim Beiko, the coordinator of ETH1 disclosed during a dev call that a devnet was already out. Consequently, the live launch is expected in a few months. Beiko said:

We’re looking at mid-July for London, and the fork will contain EIPs 1559, 3198 (BASEFEE opcode), 3238 (Ice Age pushback).

Back in February, Ethereum developer Ryan Berckmans hinted that the upgrade could go live in July. The recent update from Beiko gives a fairly detailed roadmap of how the upgrade will go.

That being said, the next step on the roadmap is a client freeze. However, the testnet will not go out until June, with devs having around one month for a full network-like testnet environment.

EIP-1559 will introduce a mechanism that allows users to adjust gas fees and pay the lowest bid for a block. In addition to the fee-burning proposal, Ethereum developers have also proposed to fast-track the difficulty increase from a previously planned Q2 2022 to December. Beiko remarked:

Given that we want to either ship Shanghai and/or the Merge this year, we agreed we should make the bomb go off sooner as a forcing function. Everyone on the call agreed on aiming for December.

Meanwhile, interest in the digital asset has continued to rise. The ETH 2.0 staking contract has received more than 4 million ETH.

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