Ethereum London Hard Fork to Make Some Tokens Worthless

[RSRS]

In the run-up to the London hard fork, the Ethereum upgrade slated for the early hours of August 5, much of the talk has been around EIP-1559, a contentious code change that will burn transaction fees, taking some ETH out of circulation.

But those aren't the only tokens the London upgrade will do away with.

Gas tokens such as GST2 and CHI, used by developers to secure lower prices when deploying smart contracts, will become obsolete.

amidst the coordination for EIP-1559, I admit we have neglected comms on EIP-3529: Reduction in refunds,

PSA: these tokens will be w/out functions in <1wk, divest accordingly

fortunately i think the majority of holders were more sophisticated market makers, users eg. @1inch https://t.co/2SGFz2llm4

— trent.eth (@trent_vanepps) July 30, 2021

London comprises five separate Ethereum Improvement Proposals, changes to the network that have been submitted, discussed by developers and other stakeholders, and integrated into the code. One of them is EIP-3529.

As Tim Beiko, a core developer with the Ethereum Foundation explained on The Daily Decrypt podcast this month: "How Ethereum works today is if you store data on Ethereum...when you remove that data from the network, you get a small gas refund back to kind of incentivize people to clean up after themselves."

In essence, there are smart contracts—code that automates transactions for things like NFT purchases and asset swaps—that are no longer needed after a certain point, kind of how an aluminum can is no longer necessary after the soda has been drunk. Clean it up or destroy it and get a small refund on the gas—or, generally speaking, the transaction costs—you paid for it.

EIP-3529 does away with the refunds.

According to Beiko, while the idea of refunds was good in theory, it was more commonly used by developers to take advantage of low gas fees on the network—which corresponds to times where the network is being used less—to fill it with "basically junk data." They'd then get their refunds when gas fees returned to their higher levels.

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