Ethereum 2.0: London Upgrade Success Brings Fresh Hopes for Upcoming Merge

The Ethereum London hard fork just dropped and dropped so good that it’s giving ETH fans fresh new hopes for the 2.0 transition. Co-founder Vitalik hailed the upgrade as a success.

He added that this has given him more confidence for the upcoming merge to the ETH 2.0 chain. Speaking to Bloomberg News from Singapore, Buterin said that

EIP-1559 is definitely the most important part of London.”

Its most important addition, perhaps, has been changing the fee generation mechanism which results in a portion of the fees being burnt.

More than 3,500 ETH worth around $9.8 million has already been burnt since the upgrade launched, just 18 hours ago. This gave more confidence to Ethereum developers as mentioned by Vitalik. He noted that

The successful deployment of the London upgrade is proof that the Ethereum ecosystem is able to make significant changes and that it Definitely makes me more confident about the merge.

As per official documentation, the current Ethereum mainnet will “merge” with the proof-of-stake Beacon Chain soon, which will mark the end of proof-of-work for Ethereum. This needs to follow the rollout of shard chains in the network, but will unlikely happen this year. At the same time, ETH 2.0 researchers are hard at work to accelerate the timetable.

Once the merging process finishes, the new mainnet will be able to run smart contacts on PoS. This will eliminate the power-consuming mining operations. It could also potentially lower the network’s energy consumption by 99%.

Of course, the prospect of a less power-eating, more cost-friendly Ethereum excites nearly everyone in the blockchain sphere. At the time of writing, Ethereum is up 3.48% in the last 24 hours with a price of $2,773.