Ethereum’s ‘EIP 1559’ Fee Market Overhaul Greenlit for July

One of the most significant and contentious alterations to the Ethereum blockchain in recent memory is now scheduled for inclusion into its codebase.

Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559 will be packaged with the London hard fork this coming July regardless of the mining industry’s discontent with the proposal, according to the All Core Developers call Friday. At least five other EIPs are likely to join EIP 1559 in London.

EIP 1559 flips a typical blockchain transaction on its head in order to fix numerous issues with Ethereum’s user experience. Traditionally, a user sends a gas fee to a miner for a transaction to be included in a block. That gas fee will now be sent to the network itself as a sort of “burn” called basefee with only an optional tip paid to miners. The burnt fee is algorithmically set as well, ostensibly making it easier for users to pay a fair fee.

The proposal has garnered some of the largest support to date from Ethereum application creators and users alike, given the current difficulty of selecting a correct transaction fee. Miners and mining pools, on the other hand, have been gathering in opposition against the proposal as it progressed toward mainnet.

Mining gold rush

Indeed, Ethereum mining has been a particularly lucrative business of late. Total mining revenue surpassed a record $1.3 billion in February, with some 50% coming from fees alone, according to Coin Metrics. An increase in both the price of ether and transaction fees has introduced a wave of new hash power to the network, which is more than double that of a year ago.