It’s all hands on deck for Ethereum[1] as the second biggest blockchain by market cap prepares for the Altair Upgrade on 27 October. Following this, Ethereum users and developers will be gearing up for the long-awaited “Merge” in late 2021 or early 2022.
However, Ethereum has also marked another intriguing milestone.
Burning money
Crypto influencer Lark Davis took to Twitter to announce[2] that Ethereum had burned more than 600,000 ETH [over $2,428,866,000 at press time] due to EIP-1559.
As previously reported[3], the burning of Ether makes the alt coin more scarce and thus, more valuable. This could eventually reflect in its price, and help Ether perform better in March 2022[4] than it did in March 2021.
Regarding other developments next year, it’s worth noting that Ethereum’s difficulty bomb[5] has been pushed back to June 2022[6]. Ethereum developer Tim Beiko recently said[7],
“All that being said, we’re going to push the bomb back to June 2022, which is 4 months after February [..] To be clear, if the merge was ready before, we could do it prior to that. Also, we can push the bomb back again if we’re not ready. We’ll need to make a call around Feb!”
Devs and more
Trent Van Epps, an Ecosystem Person at the Ethereum Foundation, put out a graphic[8] to help users better understand where they were on the Ethereum roadmap. At press time, several Ethereum clients had switched to post-merge devnets after various merge events[9].
Yet, coming to Ethereum’s gas fees, Van Epps denied[10] that EIP-1559 was responsible for an increase in the same. He instead claimed[11] that “unprecedented NFT demand for blockspace”[12]
