Anyone involved in the Ethereum community will know about the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP-1559).
The proposal is set to make the cost of transactions on Ethereum more predictable and burn ETH when transactions are sent.
The Ethereum network has been responding to the proposal by donating tens of thousands of dollars worth of ETH and DAI to help with development.
The EIP-1559 Proposal
In April 2019, Ethereum developers, including Vitalik Buterin proposed Ethereum’s fee model needed improving, as the current system is “inefficient and needlessly costly to users.”
To solve the inefficiencies, the devs proposed the introduction of a “market rate” for transactions and to burn a majority of the ETH spent on each transaction.
The implementation will provide wallets and users an improved user-experience of gas management, while also improving Ethereum’s monetary management system.
Is It Make or Break for Ethereum?
Ethereum proponents and developers launched a grant for EIP-1559 on the decentralized funding platform Gitcoin on June 26, and by yesterday it had raised almost $17,000.
However much is raised it will be used to cover the implementation of EIP into clients, auditing the specifications, and providing bug bounties.
It seemed like the EIP proposal had gone the way of many other Ethereum upgrade proposals, but became part of the conversation in Ethereum circles more recently, and it’s really stirred the Ethereum community up.
As well as many contributing, it’s got the community pontificating the importance of the success of the upgrade.
Blocktower Capital CIO Ari Paul was concise with his regards to the proposal’s success, claiming it was actually ‘make or break for Ethereum.’
EIP 1559 is make or break for ethereum.
— Ari Paul ⛓️ (@AriDavidPaul) June 26, 2020
Which got a response from Vitalik Buterin who asked why it would break Ethereum, to which Paul claimed all crypto use cases were “leapfroggable”, adding that with almost 7.4 billion not attached to the crypto space, it was about building a sound platform for their value proposition, and then growing as fast as possible to attract the newcomers to the space, to seemingly see off its competitors.
Others disagreed with Ari Paul’s claim that it was make-or-break, with developer Tim Beiko saying it wasn’t an upgrade of that mangtitude, and that proof of stake was the real make or breaker for Ethereum.
While it can’t be underestimated, EIP-1559 isn’t critical to Ethereum’s long term success. Sure, it will make improvements to the transaction fees, and with the delays in Ethereum 2.0 upgrade it will boost the confidence of the Ethereum community.
Author: Pablo Clarke
