On June 24, the London hard fork, which includes changes to the EIP-1559 proposal, was activated on the Ropsten testnet. In just a day, 88,000 ETH was burned.
As part of EIP-1559, when paying commissions, ETH coins are burned, which will reduce transaction fees, but at the same time reduce the income of miners. The changes turned out to be very effective – 88,000 ETH were burned on the test network. We are talking, of course, about the same test coins that have no real value. But if that amount of ETH were burned on the main Ethereum network, then the amount of destroyed coins would be $ 177 million.
The London hardfork will soon be activated on two more Ethereum test networks, and then the update will come to the main network of the second cryptocurrency. Goerli’s testnet update is scheduled for June 30, with activation on July 7 on the Rinkeby network. The exact date of the hard fork for the mainnet has yet to be determined.
According to ConsenSys estimates, after the changes in the framework of EIP-1559, the annual emission of ether will decrease by 1.6 million coins ($ 3.1 billion at the current rate), and inflation will fall to 1.4%. The developers are confident that this will provide additional incentive to move to the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus.
Interestingly, a vulnerability was discovered in EIP-1559 that could lead to network congestion. However, the developers fixed the error in time.