Author: Brockqin; Editor: Gatekeeper; Operation: Xiao Shi Feng Qing Yang
In the second half of this year, the Ethereum community will usher in two major transformative upgrades: "London Upgrade" and "Shanghai Upgrade".
The EIP-1559 included in the London upgrade will change the Gas fee structure of the Ethereum mainnet and introduce a destruction mechanism for the ETH token model. At the same time, EIP-3529 will directly affect the invalidation of the Gas Token on the Ethereum after the upgrade.
The Shanghai upgrade may realize the merger of ETH1/ETH2, which will completely change the consensus mechanism of the Ethereum mainnet. At the same time, the token supply and issuance model of ETH will also change.
For this London upgrade, some of the EIPs involved may have a high threshold for new users to understand. Before getting to know each EIP in depth, let’s briefly summarize the possible impact of this upgrade:
•EIP-1559 can make the future Ethereum Gas fee more predictable and stable. At the same time, nearly half of the network fee in the future Ethereum network may be directly destroyed. Long-term value support has a profound impact, especially after Ethereum transitions to PoS in the future. Under the premise of the ecological prosperity of Ethereum, the ETH fee for network destruction can even offset the newly issued ETH tokens of the network, pushing ETH into the era of deflation.
• EIP-3529 will affect users who hold Gas Token (such as CHI, GST2). It is recommended to sell it before the upgrade or use it when the Gas fee is high. Otherwise, after the upgrade, such Gas Token will theoretically return to zero .
• EIP-3554 is mainly related to miners, the difficulty bomb is postponed to December 1, 2021, or the deadline for Ethereum Pow miners.
first level title
"Upgrade time"
In a previous Ethereum Developer Core conference call,The developer has tentatively scheduled the London upgrade of the Ethereum mainnet for July 14.However, the exact time depends on the London upgrade status of each Ethereum testnet at that time. According to the announcement on the official blog of the Ethereum Foundation on June 18, after all testnets have successfully completed the London upgrade, the specific upgrade of the Ethereum mainnet will be determined. time. Currently, the upgrade plan for each testnet is as follows:
• Ropsten: June 24, block height 10,499,401
• Goerli: June 30, block height 5,062,605
• Rinkeby: July 7, block height 8,897,988
first level title
"Upgrade content"
According to the specification document of the London upgrade, this upgrade mainly includes five major EIPs, they are:
•EIP-1559: Change the Gas fee structure of the Ethereum mainnet and introduce a destruction mechanism for the ETH token model.
• EIP-3198: Add BASEFEE opcode.
•EIP-3529: Canceled the gas refund of the SELFDESTRUCT opcode and lowered the gas refund of the SSTORE opcode, which directly affects the invalidation of Gas Token on Ethereum after the upgrade (CHI & GST2).
• EIP-3541: Reject new contracts starting with 0xEF bytecode.
• EIP-3554: Difficulty bomb postponed to December 1, 2021, or deadline for Ethereum Pow miners.
secondary title
EIP-1559
EIP-1559 is the protagonist of this upgrade and one of the most noteworthy changes in the history of Ethereum.
To put it simply, EIP-1559 has changed the current Ethereum mainnet price-priority gas fee mechanism, using the gas fee structure of "basic fee" + "miner's tip", which can effectively achieve the stability and predictability of network gas fees. At the same time, the block size will have an elastic upper limit, and the basic fee will be automatically adjusted according to the utilization of the block space.
Specifically, the current Gas quotation mechanism adopted by the Ethereum network is the first-price auction mechanism, that is, transactions with high Gas Price quotations are prioritized. Although this mechanism has a low threshold for understanding and is easy to operate, its biggest problem is that it is difficult to estimate the Gas fee, especially during the peak transaction period, which often triggers Gas auctions and quickly raises the Gas Price. EIP-1559 achieves stable and predictable gas costs by introducing a combination of "basic fee" + "miner's tip" gas fee structure and an elastic block size cap that dynamically changes according to demand.
For users, there is no need to worry about the setting of the basic fee, because the setting agreement of the basic fee will be automatically adjusted according to the utilization of the network block space. The long-term goal of EIP-1559 is 10 million gas per block and a new hard cap of 20 million gas per block. When the block size is below the target, the base fee is reduced to stimulate transaction demand. When the block size exceeds the limit, the base fee increases to dampen transaction demand. Although the basic fee is automatically set by the network, when submitting a transaction, the user also needs to configure two parameter values: "miner tip" and "total fee cap feeCap".
• Miner's tip: It is only necessary for users to set their miner's tip when the block size is higher than the hard cap of 20 million Gas. At this time, miners will give priority to transactions with higher miner's tip quotes.
•Total fee cap feeCap: represents the highest fee that the user is willing to pay for this transaction (ie basic fee + tip). When the network is extremely congested, the basic fee will be very high. At this time, the transaction that is lower than the current basic fee by setting the total fee cap feeCap will be in the Pending state. You can wait for the miners to package the transaction after the future basic fee drops.
At the same time, the most anticipated function of EIP-1559 this time may be the destruction of the basic fee, which has many far-reaching meanings:
•Introducing a destruction mechanism to the ETH token model can effectively reduce the inflation rate of ETH tokens. In the future, with the assistance of the transition from the main network to PoS, ETH may even enter the era of total deflation.
secondary title
EIP-3198
secondary title
EIP-3529
EIP-3529 can be regarded as another major change in this London upgrade. Its direct impact is that Gas Tokens on Ethereum (currently 1inch CHI and GasToken GST2) will become invalid after the upgrade is completed.
Let's not explain the changes contained in EIP-3529 for now, let's first understand Gas Tokens.
Gas Tokens are essentially the tokenization of Ethereum block capacity rents. Gas Tokens utilizes Ethereum’s storage refund mechanism. Users mint Gas Tokens by saving data in the GasToken contract storage, and then send Gas Tokens back to the contract for destruction, releasing previously saved storage elements, and the obtained Gas refunds are available Used to offset the Gas fee for new transactions.
The current function of Gas refund is to motivate developers to clear the state when possible, but in fact, after the emergence of Gas Tokens, Gas refund leads to an increase in the size of the state.
Therefore, EIP-3529 will remove the gas refund for the SELFDESTRUCT opcode and reduce the gas refund for the SSTORE opcode. At present, most GasToken contracts are destroyed by calling the SELFDESTRUCT opcode, so the Gas Token mechanism will no longer take effect after the upgrade.
secondary title
EIP-3541
For ordinary users, there is no need to care about EIP-3541, because it is more of an EIP related to developers.
secondary title
EIP-3554
EIP-3554 aims to delay the inclusion of the difficulty bomb in the Shanghai upgrade until December 1, 2021. The difficulty bomb has been postponed three times before, during Metropolis (EIP-649), Constantinople (EIP-1234), and Muir Glacier (EIP-2384).
The purpose of incorporating the difficulty bomb into the Shanghai upgrade is to allow Ethereum to transition smoothly from PoW to PoS mechanism. After the introduction of the difficulty bomb, the difficulty of mining will become more and more difficult, and the difficulty value will increase as the block height increases. The height of a certain block starts to rise exponentially, greatly increasing the difficulty of mining in a short period of time, that is, the difficulty bomb breaks out and enters the ice age, forcing all miners to abandon the old chain to complete the transformation of Ethereum PoS.
first level title
"EIP-1559 Destruction Preview"
The destruction of EIP-1559 handling fees in this London upgrade is the most anticipated part of the Ethereum community. The destruction can effectively reduce the inflation rate of ETH tokens. era of deflation.
At present, some developers in the Ethereum community have created an ETH fee destruction visualization site http://watchtheburn.com/ based on the Ethereum developer network Calaveras to prepare for the visualization of ETH fee destruction data on the main network in the future. Currently, Calaveras The total fee burn on the developer network has reached nearly 700 ETH.
At the same time, some community members have simulated the cumulative amount of ETH that will be destroyed by implementing EIP-1559 in the past year, which is close to 3 million ETH.
Even though the transaction activity on Ethereum has been relatively sluggish recently, and network fees have fallen sharply, we believe that the prosperity and activity of the future ecology of Ethereum is inevitable, and the prosperity of the future ecology is bound to be able to directly affect ETH through the destruction of ETH fees. value and price. Although some community users may wonder whether the prevalence of Layer 2 in the future will lead to a decrease in the total network transaction fee, it is impossible to draw a conclusion at present, because the relationship may show a dynamic balance in the future, although Layer 2 can effectively reduce Transaction fees, but this cheap transaction fee will attract more transaction demand, and even push network fees to another level.
Reference link:
Reference link:
http://watchtheburn.com/
https://duneanalytics.com/phabc/eip-1559---daily-eth-issuance
https://ethfans.org/posts/london-upgrade-overview
