On July 14th, Ethereum will usher in the London hard fork network upgrade. At that time, five (EIP-1559, EIP-3198, EIP-3529, EIP-3541 and EIP-3554) EIPs will be included in the upgrade specification and officially carried out. This upgrade will bring some positive changes to the transaction fees and circulation distribution on the Ethereum network, especially the much-discussed improvement proposal of EIP-1559, which will truly enter the actual combat landing stage from the discussion stage. So, what are the current preparations for Ethereum for the London upgrade?
The development of the Ethereum network: various data are leading the way
The block height of the Ethereum main network reached 12740370, and the 7-day average of the median Ethereum gas fee dropped to 16Gwei, which was lower than the gas fee at the beginning of 2020. The 14-day transaction volume did not fluctuate too much and remained relatively stable. Regarding the development process of ETH2.0, Ethereum developer Tim Beiko stated that ETH 2.0 “now has an appropriate specification in terms of consensus.” That is, Ethereum 2.0 has finalized the final merger specification for the complete transition to Proof of Stake (PoS).
(Image source: Ethersan.io)
Data from the official website of ETH2 Launch Pad shows that there are nearly 6 million ETH pledged in the ETH2 network, with 180,473 validators, and more than 5% of the ETH supply is currently locked in pledge. In the past week, the amount of pledges and pledgers have risen steadily. The amount of pledges rose from about 5.5 million to 5.77 million, and the number of pledge verifiers increased by nearly 8,000. The analysis believes that this upgrade will destroy transaction fees, and the destruction rate of Ethereum this time is very high, which may cause Ethereum deflation, which will inevitably have a greater impact on the circulation price of ETH, which may well explain why London After the upgrade of the testnet, the amount of pledges has been increasing. It was precisely this week that JP Morgan Chase released a report that pledged to bring about 9 billion U.S. dollars in revenue to the cryptocurrency industry every year. According to this scale, when the Ethereum upgrade arrives, The value of the pledge industry will usher in a new high.
(Image source: launchpad.ethereum.org)
In terms of DeFi data, affected by the overall market situation, DeFi fell in the cold, with both transaction volume and user volume showing a downward trend. According to data from Debank, the total lock-up volume of the DeFi protocol is 70.9 billion U.S. dollars. Among them, the Curve lock-up of 8.3 billion U.S. dollars in Ethereum ranks first, but several transaction latitudes are showing a downward trend, which also roughly reflects the current DeFi protocol. The overall market. At the same time, we also found that the ecological development of Polygon, the second-tier expansion plan of Ethereum, has been developing rapidly. Among the top-ranked DeFi protocols, several protocols based on the Polygon chain have appeared. This also reflects that the second-tier network has played a role in solving the performance dilemma of Ethereum and the universality of industry adoption.
(From Debank, Curve’s business data)
In terms of Dapps, according to data from the official website of Dappbirds, there are now 3543 Dapps, of which 2222 are Ethereum Dapps, accounting for 60% of the total. Ethereum has 92,868 24-hour users, which is far ahead of other public chains. Its active Dapp mainly focuses on social and gaming.
(The chart comes from Dappbirds)
Process arrangements before the London upgrade
On June 24, the Ethereum testnet Ropsten activated the London upgrade at block height 10499401, the Ethereum improvement proposal EIP-1559 has also been deployed on the testnet, and the test version of the second-tier expansion solution StarkNet has also been deployed on the Ethereum testnet Ropsten online. After that, the London upgrade is expected to be launched on Ethereum’s Goerli, Rinkeby, and Kovan testnets at approximately every 7-day interval. After these testnets are successfully upgraded, the upgrade activation block of the Ethereum mainnet will be determined. Allegedly, Kovan’s upgrade may be after the mainnet upgrade.
Recent progress of the Lay2 expansion plan
In terms of Optimistic, recently, the blockchain development platform Alchemy has added support for Ethereum’s expansion solution, Optimism. After the relevant functions are launched on the development platform, developers can create Optimism applications through Alchemy. In addition, by registering on the waiting list on Alchemy, you can get early access to Optimism’s testnet and mainnet updates. As for the time of the Optimisitic mainnet, it may happen this month. Regarding Arbitrum, the Arbitrum One Layer 2 testnet has opened up the mainnet access rights to developers last month, and everyone is currently optimistic about its operation. Some well-known protocols such as Uniswap V3, Cream Finance, and The Graph have all been deployed and integrated. At present, they have basically included the configuration and deployment of DeFi, applications, wallets, and other mid-upstream and upstream configurations. Another zero-knowledge proof Rollup expansion solution StarkNet will launch a testnet this month, and zkSync 2.0 will be launched as soon as August. In contrast, Polygon’s pace of development is much more rapid. Only in the project progress report published last week, it has more than 20 external cooperation or agreement deployment matters, including cross-chain wallet ONTOWallet and zero mortgage. Different developers such as the DeFi platform MonoX and GetProtocol’s NFT have chosen to work together with Polygon to help its ecosystem develop rapidly.
In short, for a network as large as Ethereum, any upgrade of it will bring about a particularly obvious external impact, and there is no lack of opportunity value and revolutionary risk in it. From the various data and actions above, before the time when Ethereum started to “ignite”, the adjustment and optimization of its internal network carried out countless trials and experiments, and “moisturizing things silently” accumulated “hot” burning. Sufficient supply will eventually promote Ethereum and the entire crypto industry to usher in rounds of waves.