Ethereum Berlin hard fork now deployed, here’s what to expect

TL;DR Breakdown

• Ethereum Berlin hard fork is currently live on ETH mainnet, at the block height of 12,244,000.
• One of the EIPs aims to reduce the expensive gas fees on the network slightly.

Ethereum Berlin, another major software upgrade for the Ethereum blockchain, has finally been deployed on the mainnet. Berlin is one of the major upgrades proposed for the second-largest blockchain network in 2021. Among other things, Berlin is expected to at least slightly moderate the expensive transaction fees faced by Ethereum network users.

Ethereum Berlin upgrade features four EIPs

According to information on the blockchain explorer, Etherscan, the Ethereum Berlin upgrade went live at the block height of 12,244,000, which was mined by the Hiveon pool. The next major upgrade to the Ethereum blockchain – London Hard Fork – is expected to happen in July. Amid today’s Berlin upgrade, Ethereum node operators and ETH miners are expected to update their software client.

The Berlin hard fork debuted with four Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) – i.e., EIP-2565, EIP-2718, EIP-2929, and EIP-2930.

The EIP-2565 proposal aims to lower gas prices to make Ethereum’s Modular Exponentiation (also known as “ModExp”) more usable in practice. The second proposal, EIP-2718, introduces a sort of” wrapper,” or envelope, for future transactions, which will enable users to combine transactions on the network.

EIP-2929 is the third proposal co-authored by Vitalik Buterin to increase gas prices by threefold for access opcodes in order to prevent DoS attacks. The last proposal, EIP-2930, is expected to reduce the risk of smart contract breakage, according to the update shared by Ethereum Foundation.

ETH market reaction

Ether (ETH) still maintains an upward trend during the time of writing. The second-largest cryptocurrency was trading at $2,432 on Coinmarketcap, which represents about a three percent increase in price over the past 24 hours. ETH has a market capitalization of over $280 billion.