Happy Birthday Ethereum! What optimizations are included in the London hard fork upgrade happening in six days?

The Ethereum network will undergo an upgrade at block height 12,965,000, codenamed: London, scheduled for August 5, 2021.

(This article is authorized to be reposted from imToken, with the original title "Announcement of the Ethereum London Upgrade". Original article here)

We can check the upgrade countdown through the link below👇:

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https://goto.etherscan.com/block/countdown/12965000

What do imToken users need to do?

imToken will support this upgrade, and users do not need to take any action.

What optimizations are there in the London Network Upgrade

The network upgrade is an adjustment to the underlying Ethereum protocol, introducing new rules to enhance the system.

(EIP: Ethereum Improvement Proposal)

This network upgrade includes five Ethereum Improvement Proposals, namely: EIP-1559, EIP-3198, EIP-3529, EIP-3541, EIP-3554, which contribute to improving the security and scalability of the Ethereum network:

EIP-1559

As the most significant change in this upgrade, EIP-1559 will adjust the fee mechanism of the current Ethereum mainnet (Eth1). This proposal will introduce a base fee, which will automatically adjust the gas price required for on-chain operations based on the usage of Ethereum block space, helping wallet service providers and users to estimate operation costs conveniently.

In addition, EIP-1559 introduces a new transaction type that allows users to set the maximum fee they are willing to pay for the current operation and the fee to be paid to miners, and can refund users the difference between the maximum fee and the base fee and miner fee.

Furthermore, EIP-1559 burns a portion of the transaction fees, to some extent slowing down the inflation rate of ETH. Therefore, many in the community see this as a significant improvement to the Ethereum economy.

For more details on the mechanism and impact of EIP-1559, please refer to the "References" section at the end of the document.

EIP-3198

EIP-3198, in conjunction with EIP-1559, introduces a new opcode: BASEFEE.

EIP-3529

EIP-3529 eliminates gas refunds for SELFDESTRUCT and reduces refunds for SSTORE. The intention behind designing refunds was to incentivize developers to clear state whenever possible, but in practice, we found an increasing trend in state usage with the invention of gas tokens. Therefore, EIP-3529 adjusts gas refunds.

Note: If you hold gas tokens like Chi, their functionality may be disabled after the upgrade.

EIP-3541

EIP-3541 will prevent the deployment of new contracts starting with 0xEF, without affecting existing contracts, laying the foundation for a broader EVM improvement described by EIP-3540.

EIP-3554

EIP-3554 postpones the execution date for the difficulty bomb to December 2021. The difficulty bomb is a mechanism for Ethereum to transition gradually from PoW to PoS. It has been executed three times so far, during the Metropolis EIP-649, Constantinople EIP-1234, and Muir Glacier EIP-2384 upgrades.