London Hard Fork har vært en suksess — ett steg nærmere ETH 2.0

Ethereum er et stort steg nærmere å fusjonere med Ethereum 2.0 nå som London hard fork-oppgraderingen har blitt aktivert med suksess. Oppgraderingen har vært vellykket, og selv prosjektets medgründer, Vitalik Buterin, sier han føler seg mer trygg på den ventende fusjonen.

Ifølge Buterins nylige intervju har EIP-1559 vært den viktigste delen av London, selv om den bare var en del av den komplette hard fork. Som mange sannsynligvis vet, har denne spesifikke EIP-en justert mekanismen for gebyrgenerering, noe som vil føre til at en del av gebyrene blir brent.

Så langt har over $10 millioner i Ethereum blitt brent etter lanseringen av oppgraderingen. Samtidig kommenterte Buterin at den vellykkede utrullingen av London-oppgraderingen er bevis på at Ethereums økosystem er mer enn i stand til store endringer.

Han bemerket også at oppgraderingen gjør ham mer sikker på den ventende fusjonen med Ethereum 2.0, som vil transformere blokkjeden på den største måten hittil. Overgangen til Ethereum 2.0 har vært ett av de mest etterlengtede hendelsene i hele kryptobransjen i flere år nå, selv om den stadig har blitt utsatt på grunn av kompleksiteten i overgangen.

Ethereum har fortsatt en vei å gå før den når ETH 2.0

Ethereum’s official documentation shows that the mainnet is supposed to merge with the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) Beacon Chain, which will result in Ethereum adopting PoS, and permanently drop Proof-of-Work (PoW). This is considered necessary as PoW is not only slow but also harmful to the environment. It is an old consensus algorithm — so old that it is used by Bitcoin itself, the oldest and largest cryptocurrency.

Ethereum aims to switch to a faster, more modern PoS, which will reduce, or even completely eliminate some limitations that the network is facing currently. The project’s fees should go down, its speed should increase, and the project is expected to become more capable of handling massive amounts of demand that it is facing.

The documents also show that the merge will come before the rollout of shard chains, but it is still unlikely that it is going to happen in 2021, even though developers are working on ways of speeding up the timetable and moving faster. Still, once it does finally arrive, the new, merged mainnet will be able to run smart contracts on PoS, which will also eliminate mining operations and reduce the network’s energy consumption by as much as 99%.

At least, this is what is expected to happen. This is important as energy consumption, the carbon footprint that mining is producing, and similar issues have been a thorn in the side of many coins, especially Bitcoin. In fact, according to Elon Musk, Bitcoin’s high energy consumption is the reason why Tesla decided to stop accepting Bitcoin payments only a few months after this became a possibility.

Viktigheten av London-oppgraderingen

When it comes to the London upgrade, it brought more than fee burning alone. It also ushered in variable block sizes, meaning that people are now less likely to have to wait for long periods of time for their transactions to be processed. Since Ethereum is a massive ecosystem, full of dApps, other tokens and coins, smart contracts, and it now bears the majority of DeFi and NFT activity, it is not surprising that its blockchain is overburdened with transactions.

Unfortunately, fixed blocks have made it impossible to do anything about it but try to introduce small changes in hopes of bringing even the smallest relief. London upgrade was the first big change in the way the blocks themselves function, as they can now expand or contract in order to match the transaction load.

This will massively improve user experience, the speed at which waiting transactions are being processed, and generally, it will reduce the waiting periods. As such, users conducting the transactions will no longer have to compete for miners’ attention, and so the average trading fee should go down gradually, as well. Buterin sees this as a major contribution to improving user experience, and very positive development for Ethereum market sentiment, which it does seem to be.