Ethereum’s Berlin hard fork tentatively scheduled for April 14th

• Ethereum’s Berlin hard fork is tentatively scheduled for April 14th. 
• EIP-1559 still gets quite some resistance from Ethereum’s miners; a community call is planned for this Friday.

Several Ethereum core developers have confirmed April 14th as the tentative date for the Berlin hard fork. As Afri Schoeden tweeted and Tim Beiko confirmed, Berlin is expected to be activated on block level OxBAD420.

It’s true 😅! https://t.co/hlYuMoKBsv

— Tim Beiko | timbeiko.eth (@TimBeiko) February 24, 2021

Berlin is an update implemented on top of Ethereum 1.0, introducing improvements to its operation while the Ethereum core devs continue to push forward with the development of the Beacon Chain, Ethereum 2.0‘s proof of stake blockchain. 5 clients are ready for implementation – Geth, Besu, Nethermind, EthereumJS and OpenEthereum. As the image below shows, the clients have merged the code that includes EIP-2565, 2315, 2929, 2718, 2930. Only EthereumJS has not yet included the last two proposals.

Nice Update to the Readiness Checklist. Look at all that sea of green. ✅✅✅✅✅

👀 Code merged into Participating Clients 👀 pic.twitter.com/iR9fN2rkyx

— James Hancock 🏗 (@JHancock) January 19, 2021

What will the Berlin hard fork bring to Ethereum?

The referred proposals will define ModExp gas cost (EIP-2565), introduce 3 opcodes to support new subroutines in Ethereum Virtual Machine (EIP-2315), increase the gas cost for state accesses in opcodes (EIP-2929), define a new transaction type to support a new type of transactions in the future (2718) and add a transaction type with an access list, an address list, and key storage.

Following Berlin’s activation, EIP-1559 is expected to be activated in as separate for in July, modifying Ethereum’s fee model. The EIP has caused high anticipation in the Ethereum community as the congestion of the network has caused fees to skyrocket, leading to annoyance among many users and migration to other blockchains, such as the Binance Smart Chain.

In the latest update on the progress of EIP-1559, Tim Beiko explained that the proposal has been updated to be compatible with Berlin. However, there is still quite some resistance from Ethereum’s miners on the proposal as they would lose quite some money due to the burning of fees. Beiko stated:

Miners are pushing back against EIP-1559 and others are pushing back against the pushback: lots of new write ups from both sides, and a community call is planned for this Friday ⛏