Ethereum’s Hotly Anticipated London Hard Fork Set For Full Mainnet Launch On August 4

The long-awaited London hard fork, also known as the EIP-1559, has a tentative launch date. The upgrade should ship as soon as this August.

London Hard Fork Expected To Launch In August

A key bullish catalyst on the horizon for ethereum is a major infrastructure upgrade to the network: the London hard fork.

It includes five crucial Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) upgrades, but the star of the show is EIP-1559, which is highly controversial as it promises to make ETH a deflationary token for the first time in its history by burning the base fee. It is believed that this burn will decrease miner revenue.

In essence, EIP-1559 will replace Ethereum’s “first-price auction fee” model with a base fee that can be adjusted according to demand. This aims to dramatically reduce gas prices for users.

Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko took to Github on Tuesday to finalize London’s launch date; he proposed to schedule the mainnet activation of the hard fork on block 12,965,000 between 13:00 UTC and 17:00 UTC on August 4.

“If we can roughly hit that timeline, then August 4th should provide enough time to advertise the client releases that are mainnet compatible, and allow infrastructure providers & node operators to upgrade.”

Worth noting that this Aug. 4 date is not etched in stone. In a follow-up tweet, Beiko noted that the date would depend on whether someone objected to it within the next 24 hours. 

Notably, the EIP-1559 was initially scheduled for July 14 launch. However, some Ethereum enthusiasts have indicated that there will be delays. The London upgrade was launched on the Ropsten testnet on June 24. After this, it was deployed on Ethereum’s Goerli testnet. In particular, the final hard fork launch date was decided after the successful implementation of these two testnets. London is yet to be activated on the Rinkeby and Kovan testnets.

Besides EIP-1559, other improvement proposals included in the London hard fork are EIP-3529, EIP-3554, EIP-3198, and EIP-3541. Once London is fully activated, developers will target the Shanghai upgrade and/or the Merge later this year or early 2022. This will combine both ETH 1.0 and ETH 2.0, implementing a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus algorithm on the Ethereum network.