Key Takeaways
- London hard fork now live, Ethereum burns about 3 ETH per minute, or roughly $10,000
- Ether’s price surges to a two-month high on Friday, trades near $2,850 per coin
Ethereum London Upgrade Now Live
The Ethereum network has rolled out is highly-anticipated upgrade. The major hard fork, called London, has been burning roughly $10,000 per minute so far since the change has been implemented. The network has already burned over 4,000 ETH coins, or over $11 million in less than 24 hours since the official activation.
The upgrade to the second-largest cryptocurrency has ushered five milestone changes to the way Ethereum works. The most notable of them is EIP-1559 and it would aim to reduce transactions fees while at the same time it will allow users to estimate how much a transaction would cost. Prior to the upgrade, participants on the network had to blindly guess the amount of the fee they had to pay in order for their transaction to be processed.
The other major change part of the EIP-1559 is the introduction of the coin burn mechanism, which would aim to destroy a small portion of every fee that was previously paid to miners. This feature will be reducing the total supply of ethers, potentially resulting in a price increase over time.
Once the upgrade was launched, the price of ether initially slipped but later moved past its previous high and closed the day at $2,803, up by about 4% on the day.
ETH Overperforms Bitcoin
On Friday, the Ethereum token is hovering near the area of $2,780 to $2,800. Earlier today, the digital currency spiked to a two-month high, reaching a peak of $2,842 per coin. This week, Ethereum has been a clear winner against bitcoin in terms of price performance.
Monday-to-date, bitcoin has been trading largely muted, down by less than 1%, while ether has gained about 4.5% for the period. Both coins, however, have moved considerably to the upside over the past three weeks. Since July 21, when a sharp upward swing began to form, bitcoin has added about 37%, while ether has surged roughly 60% to current market price.
Trade BTC with 0% commission with TradeOr!