London’s hard fork is an important event for Ethereum and hopefully it will be the same for Ethereum Classic. Five years ago, the Ethereum Hard Fork Chain is preparing for the release of ECIP-1104 scheduled for February 14th.
“Mysterious” fork
The Ethereum Classic Improvement Protocol (ECIP) – 1104 appears to follow the same protocol as Ethereum’s London Hard Fork, so it was expected to bring many changes to the mainnet.
However, at the time of the five major Ethereum Improvement Protocols (EIPs), this may not be the case. Mystique Hard Fork contains only two.
The first is EIP3529, which specifies an alternative refund reduction that is adjusted so that gas prices are too high to take advantage of existing refund mechanisms.
The second EIP to be implemented is 3541, which determines that future contracts with the 0xEF prefix will not be deployed to the Ethereum Classic chain. At that time, an error message indicating ECIP1104 is displayed as the reason for the refusal.
The omitted EIPs include the most controversial changes to Ethereum, the EIP 1559 that introduced the Feburn mechanism, and the EIP 3228 that caused the delay of the difficulty bomb.
According to the details given by Ethereum Classic, the ETC chain does not require a toll-bearing mechanism as its implementation competes with the existing monetary policy introduced in ECIP 1017.
In addition, Ethereum Classic is not intended to deploy difficulty bombs on the chain, so it makes no sense to bring a bomb delay.
As mentioned in a recent update, Mystique forks are currently only 35% ready. Normally, nodes are observed to be ready by the time activation is approaching, and for the same reason 60% to 70% are expected to be ready before February 13.
Ethereum difficulty bomb
While the Ethereum Classic is preparing for the first fork in 2022, its parent chain Ethereum is approaching a rescheduled difficulty bomb.
The difficulty bomb, scheduled to take place by June this year, will officially shift Ethereum’s mining protocol from the Proof of Work model to the Proof of Stake, reducing power consumption by 99%.
Currently, the expected hard forks have not significantly affected ETC or ETH price fluctuations. Both seem to be moving sideways, following broader market clues.
