Ethereum (ETH) Tops New All-Time High Above $2450 Just Hours Before Belin Upgrade

15. Apr 2021 Posted by Akolkar B on News

Along with Bitcoin (BTC), the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency Ethereum (ETH) has been on an unprecedented rally smashing past previous records and touching new all-time highs.

Today, April 15, Ethereum (ETH) price has surged to its all-time high above $2450. At press time ETH trades with a valuations of $283 billion which is bigger than some of the giant tech companies like Intel who have been legacy players in their segment for years.

Just like 2020, Ethereum (ETH) has actually outperformed Bitcoin (BTC). While the BTC gains year-to-date stand at above 100%, Ethereum (ETH) has surged 230% so far since the beginning of 2021.

Today’s ETH price rally comes just a few hours the Berlin network upgrade for Ethereum which is likely one of the most pressing issues right now of rising Gas Price. With high DeFi activity over the last few months, the Ethereum network has been severely congested which has ultimately resulted into higher gas price.

As per the data on Etherscan, the Berlin network upgrade is just one-hour away from press time. Also, the Berlin upgrade will happen as the Ethereum blockchain reaches block number 12,440,000.

This upgrade will basically introduce four EIPs (Ethereum Improvement Proposals) to the Ethereum network. Two of these EIP-2929 and EIP-2930 affect on how the gas cost of a transaction gets computed.

While the Berlin upgrade doesn’t do much in terms of gas fee, it actually opens up the door for the London hard fork with EIP-15598 implementation scheduled ahead in July 2021. “Both these EIPs [EIP-2929 and EIP-2718] are prerequisites in getting EIP-1559, the long-awaited transaction fee upgrade, deployed to the network this summer,” said an Ethereum developer.

The major thing coming along with the London hard fork is the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559. The EIP 1559 will help to reduce the volatility of transactions on the Ethereum blockchain network.

Currently, the user directly pays the gas fee to the miner tied along with the transaction in the block. With EIP 1559, the gas fee shall go to the network itself in form of “burn”. This “burn” serves as a base fee letting users to pay an optional tip to the miners. This is to ensure that the ETH users pay fair price of the gas fee.Thus, EIP 1559 replaces the supply/demand auction-style system with a standard rate implementation across the entire network.

Although the EIP-1559 implementation is in long-term benefit of users, miners have opposed it as it will considerably reduce their income.