Ethereum Berlin Upgrade to Go Live in April with Four Key EIPs

The Ethereum development team has hinted via a March 8, 2021 blog post, that the highly anticipated Berlin upgrade will go live on mainnet on April 14, 2021, at exactly block height 12, 244,000. The Berlin hard fork follows the Istanbul and Muir Glacier upgrades and it’ll implement four important Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPS).

All Eyes on Berlin Upgrade 

Ethereum’s journey towards becoming a more scalable, cost-efficient and less energy-consuming blockchain is going on exactly as planned by the development team, as the network is now set to execute the Berlin hard fork, come April 14, or at exactly block height 12,244,000.

Per a blog post by the Ethereum Foundation’s Tim Beiko, the Berlin upgrade will first be implemented on the Ropsten, Goerli and Rinkeby testnets on March 10, 2021, March 17, and March 24, respectively, before it launches on mainnet in mid-April at block height 12,244,000.  

Notably, the Berlin upgrade is part of Ethereum 2.0 development and it will implement four EIPs, including EIP-2565, which lowers the gas fee of ModEXP precompile, EIP-2929, EIP-2718 and EIP-2930, which adds a new Ethereum transaction type. 

Ethereum Still King of Smart Contracts 

Ethereum node operators are advised to upgrade their nodes way before the network reaches block height 12, 244,00, to ensure they do not encounter any possible issues. 

Beiko wrote:

“Ethereum node operators should upgrade their nodes prior to the fork block on the networks they want to participate in. Due to block time variability, it is recommended to update several days before the expected date.”

Notably, Ether holders who store their coins on centralized exchanges or non-custodial wallets are not required to take any actions unless they are instructed to do so by their service providers. However, node operators and miners must endeavour to download and install the latest version of their Ethereum client.

“Note, TurboGeth and EthereumJS will not have client releases ready for the first test testnets, but will have a release prior to mainnet. Trinity is now deprecated and will not be supporting the Berlin upgrade,” added Beiko.

Ethereum remains the king of smart contracts and decentralized finance (DeFi) and if all goes as planned, the coming of Eth2 will only make the network stronger.

At press time, the price of ether (ETH) is up by 7.90 percent in the past 24-hours, with a market capitalization of $209.44 billion, as seen on CoinMarketCap.