Ethereum's London hard fork now likely set for August 5

An upgrade for Ethereum known as the ‘London hard fork’ is will now likely take place August 5 (Sydney time), rather than late July as earlier speculated.

Ethereum developer Tim Beiko is proposing that the fork take place at Ethereum block 12,965,000, which will likely be mined around 3.25am AEST on August 5.

The core developers will make a final decision on the proposal at their meeting beginning midnight on Saturday, AEST.

The London network upgrade (EIP-1559) has been *proposed* to go live on the Ethereum mainnet on the 4th of August 2021 at block number 12,965,000.

Final decision will be made at the core dev meeting on Friday at 14:00 UTC.

— Anthony Sassano Ξ 🦇🔊 (@sassal0x) July 6, 2021

The London hard fork will include EIP-1559 (Ethereum Improvement Protocol 1559), which is expected to reduce Ethereum transaction fees, as well four other improvement protocols.

Currently Ethereum transactions are basically handled in an auction format, with users bidding against each other to pay miners to process their transactions. When the network has been congested, transaction fee costs have soared.

“People needlessly overpay massively,” Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin wrote in an explainer in May.

EIP 1559 replaces this auction format with a standard “base fee,” which will be burned (destroyed) instead of going to miners.

5.1 While the base fee features are very important, what excites most investors is the fee burning mechanism which is like an automated stock buy back mechanism. Over time this will make ETH deflationary.

— Lark Davis (@TheCryptoLark) July 6, 2021

The hard fork also includes EIP-3238, which delays the so-called “difficulty bomb” that makes mining Ethereum much harder, and thus the network much slower.

The upgrade will delay the difficulty bomb so it won’t occur until the second quarter of 2022 – by which point developers hope the network will have transitioned to a “proof of stake” model in which mining will be obsolete.