What is EIP-1559?

The London Upgrade For Dummies

What is the London Hard Fork?

The London Hard Fork, aka the London Upgrade, was an upgrade to the Ethereum blockchain that included a set of five Ethereum improvement proposals (EIPs). The one that was most talked about was EIP-1559. This went into effect on August 5, 2021.

What is EIP?

EIP stands for Ethereum Improvement Proposal. It’s how programmers update the Ethereum blockchain. There are five steps the proposal must go through before being implemented, from at first proposing the draft to be considered to finally the Ethereum Core developers implementing the proposal. If you want the technical version, read this.

What is EIP-1559?

This Ethereum Improvement Proposal implemented two major changes:

1) Before this upgrade, users had to bid on how much they were willing to pay to have their Ethereum transaction picked up by a miner, which can be extremely costly. Under EIP-1559, this process is handled by an automated bidding system with a set fee amount that fluctuates based on how congested the network is.

2) A part of every transaction fee is burned, or removed from circulation, which will begin to reduce the supply of ether and potentially…