The team behind the Ethereum cryptocurrency has announced the completion of the London upgrade on the network which should stabilise transaction fees. According to Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559, the new transaction pricing mechanism includes a fixed network fee per block which is ‘burned’ and expands or shrinks block sizes to deal with temporary network congestion.
According to an earlier blog post, the new change won’t affect most holders of Ethereum. If your exchange, web wallet service, or mobile wallet service requires you to do anything with your Ethereum wallet, it will be up to them to let you know if any action is needed on your part, but it’s unlikely you’ll have to do anything. If you run an Ethereum node, however, you will need to upgrade it by downloading the latest Ethereum client. There are several Ethereum clients, you can find the download links in the table on the blog post.
Since May this year, the average Ethereum transaction fee has been quite stable but in the first few months, it reached very high levels that would take a decent chunk of any Ethereum people may have had, hopefully, the new changes will work and keep fees low for those who want to buy other cryptocurrencies or cash out back to fiat.
With bitcoin costing so much per unit nowadays, many looking to get involved in the crypto market have looked to invest in Ethereum instead as it has a much lower price point of $2,800 compared to bitcoin’s $38,400. Ethereum has also been performing better than bitcoin by some measures.