One of the most significant and contentious alterations to the Ethereum blockchain in recent memory is now scheduled for inclusion into its codebase. The key change is EIP 1559 which will change the way fees are distributed to miners.

Expected August 5th.

News: https://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-improvement-proposal-1559-london-hard-fork

Status: https://github.com/ethereum/eth1.0-specs/blob/master/network-upgrades/mainnet-upgrades/london.md

Evaluation

Evaluation Process

analyse impact
monitor testnet deployments and issues with any clients
investigate changes for any impact on our system or our clients
test in staging with test nets post fork in test nets.

What is changing?

Impact Analysis

There should be no impact for transaction sending, as a gas fee still needs to be included with every transaction. The only difference is that now there is a minimal required (base fee) which is included in previous blocks and can be read from there. We expect all fee calculators to still work. Also, in Berlin fork, Ethereum introduced EIP 2718 (https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-2718 ) which allows multiple transaction types. With EIP 1559, There is a legacy transaction type for client that have not migrated to the the new way of setting gas price. See https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-1559#specification

What are the regulatory implications? None

Maturity / Market Capitalization  The surviving asset’s root is ETH so the legacy carries forward

Security and Operation: No changes to the protocol should effect the security

Traceability / Monitoring  - The changes will not affect the addresses so the tracing will not differ

Exchange Connectivity and Demand  - May be reduced during the upgrade but will temporary

Type of Distributed Ledger Technology? (DLT)  - Remains ETH

Innovation and Efficiency  - Continuing to be improved

Is there contention?

This upgrade is very contentious! The whole community of investors, developers, users support EIP1559. In fact this will transfer value to every ETH holder and not only miners. A majority of miners are opposed.

Mining pools have only a few options to stop EIP 1559 now that it’s included, and most of these would be considered actively hostile against the network. The largest danger would be a 51% attack against Ethereum, which would censor transactions using the EIPs framework. It remains unlikely, however, given various financial incentives not to attack the network.

For example, successfully using a 51% attack against Ethereum would likely decrease the value of ether in the short term. (Or maybe not, as three 51% attacks on Ethereum Classic have shown).

How will MidChains understand the success of the fork?

Network stability
Fee stability
Acceptance by nodes
Acceptance by miners
Will there be a chain split and in case of split what will be the acceptance of the new vs old chain

Upgrade procedure:

MidChains chooses to participate in the fork.

upgrade test client in dev
test and monitor
two weeks prior to the fork clients will be emailed and notices displayed on the status page of the upcoming fork and how MidChains will proceed.
one week prior to the fork on the ETH deposit page clients will need to acknowledge MidChains fork policy and note on upcoming fork
prior to the actual fork on live net ETH deposits and withdrawals will be stopped
Clients will be notified by email and status page
upgrade main net client to participate in the fork
monitor for success - are there contentions and chain splits
in case of split we follow the fork if majority of miners and nodes have migrated as per our fork policy in Custody policies.
when success is concluded, deposits and withdrawals will be resumed and clients notified.

Client Notification

Clients are notified by email and status page.

Customer Service

Ethereum London