Ethereum’s EIP 1559 Fee Market Scheduled to Launch in July

An All Core Developers call today confirmed that the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559 would be packaged with the London hard fork this coming July regardless of the mining industry’s discontent with the proposal.

Developments Are Underway

The event will mark one of the significant milestones ever made on the Ethereum blockchain.

From the information given, about five other EIPs are likely to join EIP 1559 in London.

EIP 1559 Is a Big Deal

High Ethereum gas fees have been a great inconvenience in the Ethereum blockchain for a while now. In a few months, this might not be an issue anymore. Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP)-1559 will provide a solution for ETH high gas fees by improving how transactions operate on Ethereum and modifying the network’s current monetary policy’s underlying economics.

A significant feature of this new fee structure is that the inclusion fee is paid only to ETH miners. The mining will still burn essential costs under this plan. It ensures that it is only possible to use Ether-Tokens for transactions on the Ethereum network. In turn, it supports the economic value of ETH tokens within the Ethereum ecosystem and the risks associated with reducing risks involved with miner extractable value (MEV).

This burn is also designed to balance inflation on the Ethereum network, thus granting ETH miners block prizes and inclusion fees. Ensuring that the miner does not pay the base fee on an Ethereum block is vital because the mining incentive to exploit the TX fee is essentially removed to collect even more charges from network users.

Given the current difficulties of choosing the correct transaction fee, the proposal has been well received by Ethereum’s developers and consumers. On the other side, the miners and the mining pools have gathered against the initiative as it advanced to mainnet.

Campaigns Voting Out EIP

Indeed, Ethereum mining has been an incredibly lucrative business as of late. The total mining revenue surpassed a record $1.3 billion in February, with some 50% coming from fees alone, according to CoinMetrics. An increase in both the price of ether and transaction fees has introduced a wave of new hash power to the network, which is more than double that of a year ago.

Flexpool, a minority mining pool, started a publicity campaign against the EIP. There then joined several minority pools, followed by Ethermine and SparkPool. More than 60% of the hash power of the Ethereum network is now contrary to the proposal. Having about 10% hash capacity, F2Pool is the largest pool in favor of EIP.

On the call, developers from Ethereum chose to pair EIP 1559 with a difficulty blast delay. Also known as the “Ice Age,” the bomb raises the Ethereum network mining difficulty incrementally. Péter Szilágyi, the leading team at Geths, said that pairing EIP 1559 with the delay made it impossible to forge Ethereum without any technological barriers at that time.