The Holy Trinity of Ethereum - The Daily Gwei #297
Upgrading Ethereum one EIP at a time.
There are many upgrades coming to Ethereum over the next few months and years but I think the most important (at least currently) fall into the 3 EIP’s listed in my tweet below. I think at this point everyone is well aware of EIP-1559 but the other 2 are probably a mystery to most people so I’m going to break them down in this piece - enjoy!
Obviously the significance of EIP-1559 is pretty self-explanatory with myself and many other people having covered it extensively over the last 2 or so years. One of my first pieces argued that EIP-1559 would make the network “fairer for everyone” by creating a symbiotic relationship and there has been plenty of other research that’s gone into this EIP which you can find here. As a bonus - keep an eye out next week for edition 300 of this newsletter - I’ll be publishing an overview of EIP-1559 that I co-authored with a friend of mine and I believe it’s one of the best high-level pieces that will get you up to speed on EIP-1559 (just weeks before it goes live).
Next, we have EIP-3074 which is much less known within the community but is still a major upgrade for Ethereum. In short, what EIP-3074 improves is overall usability by replacing a concept known as ‘meta-transactions’ with a much simpler version. What this means for end-users is that typical user transactions such as approving a token on Uniswap and then performing a trade can be batched into just 1 transaction - no more having to do 2 separate transactions. Of course, there are concerns around this EIP, so we may see a revised one take its place before it’s implemented on mainnet. Check out this thread here for more information on EIP-3074.
Finally we have EIP-3675 which is probably unknown to most people at this stage (since it’s brand new) but I’d consider it the most important. The EIP proposer, Mikhail Kalinin, describes this EIP as a “specification of the consensus mechanism upgrade on Ethereum Mainnet that introduces Proof-of-Stake (a.k.a. The Merge)”. I don’t think I have to spell out why this is such a big deal but in case you want a full breakdown of ‘The Merge’, I wrote about it back in July 2020 here. The tl;dr - Ethereum will finally shed its Proof of Work roots in favor of the long-awaited full Proof of Stake bringing with it an enormous economic and security upgrade.
So, to summarize, we have a usability and economic upgrade coming with EIP-1559, we have a potentially large UX upgrade coming with EIP-3074 and we have a massive economic and security upgrade coming with EIP-3675. While these 3 EIP’s are being deployed at different times, I expect to see them all live on the Ethereum network within the next 12 months. On top of that, there will be more important EIP’s proposed in the future and I’ll be sure to keep you all updated on those!
Have a great weekend everyone,
Anthony Sassano
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All information presented above is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice.