The contentious Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559, will be included in its codebase in July this year. This became clear during the All Core Developers call today.
Ethereum’s Improvement Proposal 1559 is aimed at improving the overall Ethereum’s user experience when it comes to transaction fees.
Typically, a user would have to send a gas fee to a miner for their transaction to be included in a block. What EIP-1559 proposes, however, is to send that gas fee to the network itself. Called basefee, this is a sort of a “burn” and there would only be an optional tip that’s paid to the miners. The burnt fee would be set algorithmically, supposedly improving the UX.
The proposal was originally submitted by Eric Conner and its summary provides an overall outlook at what it attempts to achieve:
A transaction pricing mechanism that includes fixed-per-block network fee that is burned and dynamically expands/contracts block sizes to deal with transient congestion.
During today’s All Core Developers call, it was decided that it will be included in the so-called London hard fork coming this July.
Despite the potential improvements on the entire network that could come with EIP-1559, some of the largest Ethereum mining pools have openly displayed division on where they stand.
F2Pool, the third-largest ETH mining pool with over 10% hashrate share, shared a post, in which it supported the initiative, claiming that it would ultimately have a positive impact.
The publication says that “the general community along with core developers are siding with evolving Ethereum to include EIP-1559. It is important to side with the users and core contributors.”
F2Pool’s statement also argued that the potential EIP-1559 implementation could be factored in ETH’s price, which is more than 100% from the start of the year.
In contrast, though, the largest mining pool with nearly 25% share of the hashrate, Sparkpool, didn’t feel the same way about the integration as it could reduce the profits. They took it to Twitter to emphatically assert that the mining pool “opposes EIP-1559.”