Ethereum Core Developers Set Their Eyes On April For Berlin Hard Fork

The Ethereum core developers set their eyes on an April date for the Berlin hard fork which will facilitate live swapping ETH from a proof of work to a proof of stake blockchain as we can see more in today’s ETH news.

The Ethereum core developers set their eyes on April 14 for the Berlin hard fork at the block height of 12,244,000 according to the report concluded on Friday. The hard fork includes different optimizations for contracts like gas efficiencies, updates to how code is ready by the Ethereum Virtual Machine, and other changes to protect against the denial of service attacks.

The Berlin hard fork was initially scheduled for June or July 2020 but was delayed because of centralization issues around the Geth client on which most of the ETH nods run. The developers working on the current base layer blockchain called ETH 1.x expressed strain from maintaining this client and the Berlin hard fork was even preceded by other testnets. The update includes five Ethereum improvement proposals and will be delivered on four test networks before the deployment happens.

As reported previously, The ethereum smart contract feature that offers rebates for the fees has the developers wondering if they will have to get rid of the old code in light of the exponential rise in transaction costs. The gas tokens are loopholes that are a way to send transactions on the cheap by “tokenizing gas” for the fees paid for running the computations on-chain. The feature will allow the ETH users to buy transaction fees when they are low and store them and spend them when they are high. With the matter still being under discussion, some ETH developers worry if the tokenized gas will act as a price floor for transaction fees in the future.

Also, The second-biggest cryptocurrency by market cap has just reached $2000 for the first time ever which represents a 168% gain since the start of the year. BTC started off with a larger cap and grew about 93% in the same time span. The rise in the price has been mostly fueled by two factors. First, the institutional and retail investment in BTC helped to boost the interest in crypto overall. Since the start of the year, BTC moved from $32K to a price of $56 while most of the coins doubled in price as well, including ETH.