Ethereum's New Fork In The Road

Ethereum London Upgrade is scheduled for August 5 at approximately 15:30 (GMT+3) and currently north of 72% of the clients on the network are ready.

Introduction

Ethereum is going through some major network alterations in 2021 as it moves from its Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism in order to improve its underlying architecture. One of the most prominent upgrades this year is the London Hard Fork, which continues the progression towards Ethereum 2.0. The London update will make significant changes to Ethereum’s transaction fee system, which has long been a contentious subject due to the congestion on the network that has hosted the vast majority of decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible token (NFT) projects.

In this context, the two issues of network congestion and high transaction fees (also known as gas fees) have impeded Ethereum’s adoption even as it remains the highest-utilized blockchain across the stablecoin and decentralized finance (DeFi) sector.