Itโs all hands on deck forย Ethereum 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 โMergeโ 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 that Ethereum had burned more than 600,000 ETH [over $2,428,866,000 at press time] due to EIP-1559.
Over 600,000 #ethereum burnt due to eip1559 ๐ฅ๐ฅ๐ฅ๐ฅ
โ Lark Davis (@TheCryptoLark) October 23, 2021
As previously reported, 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 than it did in March 2021.
Regarding other developments next year, itโs worth noting that Ethereumโs difficulty bomb has been pushed back to June 2022. Ethereum developer Tim Beiko recently said,
โAll that being said, weโre going to push the bomb back to June 2022, which is 4 months after February [..]ย 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 weโre not ready. Weโll need to make a call around Feb!โ
Devs and more
Trent Van Epps, an Ecosystem Person at the Ethereum Foundation, put out a graphic to help users better understand where they were on the Ethereum roadmap. At press time, several Ethereum clients had switched to post-merge devnetsย after various merge events.
If there’s one thing I know, it’s that everyone loves timelines X infographics https://t.co/VQckxJrlp2 pic.twitter.com/uJQ8iauppP
โ trent.eth (@trent_vanepps) October 15, 2021
Yet, coming to Ethereumโs gas fees, Van Eppsย denied that EIP-1559 was responsible for an increase in the same. He insteadย claimed that โunprecedented NFT demand for blockspaceโ was the cause.
However, preparations for the Altair upgrade seem to be taking off, with more than half of Ethereum nodes ready for 27 October.
Looks like ~62% of *nodes* have upgraded for Altair
(source: https://t.co/zlqDYLEJBX)This does not reflect 1:1 on stake weight that has upgraded. We’ll not know that until the upgrade itself.
Still 6 days to goโฆ
Don’t wait, upgrade now!
โ dannyryan ๐บ๐ (@dannyryan) October 21, 2021
For reference, there were 555,943 active Ethereum addresses at press time.
Source: Etherscan
BNB joins the bonfire
Detailed in a Binance Evolution Protocol โ BEP-95 โ the Binance Smart Chain will also be burning BNB, apart from the scheduled burns by Binance.com. While similar to EIP-1559, BSCโs aim is reportedly to become more decentralized and raise the value of BNB.
An official statement reported,
โThe BEP-95 burn is solely dependent on the activity on the BSC network, and it will continue functioning (decreasing BNB supply), even after the scheduled BNB burns by Binance.com reach the target supply of 100m BNB in circulation.โ