Ethereum rolls out Berlin upgrade with 4 EIPs

After months of planning, the Ethereum community has laid out a timeline for its upcoming Berlin upgrade, marking an important milestone in its development roadmap. 

Berlin is scheduled to go live on the Ethereum mainnet at block 12,244,000, or Apr. 14, Tim Beiko wrote on Monday. Ropsten, the first testnet to upgrade, is scheduled for Mar. 10. The Goerli and Rinkeby networks are expected to upgrade in one-week increments on Mar. 17 and Mar. 24, respectively.

Ethereum node operators are being advised to upgrade to a Berlin-compatible version as soon as possible for the three testnets and before Apr. 7 for the mainnet. Beiko explained:

“Ethereum node operators should upgrade their nodes prior to the fork block on the networks they want to participate in. Due to block time variability, it is recommended to update several days before the expected date.”

Exchanges, wallet service providers and ETH holders are not required to do anything to accommodate the upgrade.

A total of four Ethereum Improvement Protocols, or EIPs, will be implemented via Berlin. They include:

• EIP-2565, which lowers the cost of the ModExp precompile;
• EIP-2929, which increases certain gas costs;
• EIP-2718, which introduces a new transaction type; and
• EIP-2930, which includes a transaction type with optional access lists.

Berlin follows the Istanbul and Muir Glacier upgrades, which took place in December 2019 and January 2020, respectively. The current upgrade was named after Devcon 0, which took place in Berlin. Ethereum’s next planned upgrade will be called London, where Devcon 1 happened.

Ethereum is still riding the momentum of its Eth2 rollout in December 2020. Eth2 kicks off a multiyear upgrade of the blockchain network as it attempts to transition from existing proof-of-work consensus to a proof-of-stake model.

The ETH price rose 6.5% on Monday to $1,767. At current values, Ethereum has a total market capitalization of $201 billion.

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