Crypto Long & Short: Why Ethereum’s ‘London’ Upgrade Matters

In T-minus 10 days, the Ethereum blockchain will undergo its 11th backward-incompatible upgrade, also called a “hard fork.” This hard fork, dubbed “London,” contains Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), each featuring code changes aimed at optimizing and improving the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.

One of the most common arguments against ether (ETH, +8.79%) (ETH) as a store of value is its unbounded coin supply. While EIP 1559 does not introduce a bitcoin-like supply cap on ETH, it does activate a mechanism to curb total supply growth over time by taking a variable amount of ETH out of circulation each time a transaction is executed. Simulations of EIP 1559 as of June 8 suggest the activation of EIP 1559 over the trailing 365 days would have burned a total of 2,967,937 ETH for a net reduction of 76% in ether supply growth over that period.

In addition to creating a bitcoin-like narrative of limited supply to ETH, EIP 1559 is expected to improve transaction wait times and remove fee-market uncertainty that damp developer and user adoption of dapps.

Finally, EIP 1559 is expected to solidify ether’s role as a form of payment for using Ethereum’s computing resources and interacting with the network’s broad system of dapps by requiring payments of transaction fees on the network to be exclusively paid in the network’s native cryptocurrency.

Crypto Long & Short: Why Ethereum’s ‘London’ Upgrade Matters, CoinDesk, Jul 26