Ethereum continued its push forward as Bitcoin’s sidekick in 2021. Let’s delve into some of the top Ethereum 2021 stories. Covered: Ethereum 2021 Berlin Hard Fork Upgrade Gas prices… Canada’s Ethereum Spot ETF London Hard Fork Upgrade Ethereum 2021 Ethereum followed its big-brother (Bitcoin) and had a tremendous year both in terms of price and […] The post Top Five Ethereum Stories Of 2021 appeared first on CryptosRus.

Top Five Ethereum Stories Of 2021

Ethereum continued its push forward as Bitcoin’s sidekick in 2021. Let’s delve into some of the top Ethereum 2021 stories.

Covered:

  • Ethereum 2021
  • Berlin Hard Fork Upgrade
  • Gas prices…
  • Canada’s Ethereum Spot ETF
  • London Hard Fork Upgrade

Ethereum 2021

Ethereum followed its big-brother (Bitcoin) and had a tremendous year both in terms of price and increasing utility.

The world’s second-largest cryptocurrency started the year in the $1385 range and is trading well above $4,000 at the end of 2021. That’s great growth for the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency with a huge market cap. This year was filled with new partnerships, increased activity because of the NFT surge, and needed upgrades providing the stepping stone to a smooth transition to ETH 2.0.

Let’s look at how the network continued to push forward this year, with the top five biggest stories for Ethereum in 2021.

Recommended: Kintsugi Testnet Is Live; When Can We Expect ETH 2.0?

5. Berlin Hard Fork Upgrade Activated

The Berlin Hard Fork software upgrade on Ethereum promised to bring down gas fees, at least slightly. The upgrade incorporated four Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs).

The EIPs included software upgrades that algorithmically reduced gas costs (EIP-2565) and a wrapper allowing multiple transaction types (EIP-2718). The other two EIPs released in this upgrade were co-written by Vitalik Buterin and summarized by Decrypt as follows:

“EIP-2929 actually increases gas costs in order to limit processing times and help block denial-of-service attacks. However, these increases are partially balanced out by EIP-2930, a proposal that also helps reduce the

risk of broken smart contracts. “

The Berlin upgrade was designed to be a stepping stone for the highly anticipated London Hard Fork upgrade. These two upgrades, paired with the final expected large upgrade (Shanghai Hard Fork) on Eth 1.0, should provide a smooth transition to Eth 2.0.

4. Visa Supports Crypto By Partnering With Ethereum

In March, Visa announced that they would be partnering with Ethereum by settling payments with USDC on the Ethereum blockchain.

With this announcement, Visa became the first major payments network to settle transactions in USDC. In order to settle these transactions with USDC, they had to choose an open-source blockchain, and they chose Ethereum. This is not only a big partnership for both Ethereum and Visa, but it’s a major industry first of bridging the gap between traditional payment settlements with fiat to crypto. Additionally, in this press release, Visa mentioned how they will be piloting this approach with their partner Crypto.com:

“Visa is piloting the capability with Crypto.com, a Visa partner and one of the world’s largest crypto platforms, and plans to offer the USDC settlement capability to additional partners later this year.”

Recommended: Visa Wants To Build Out The Crypto Ecosystem

3. Ethereum Gas Prices Skyrocket

With the recent NFT movement, there has been higher activity than ever before on Ethereum, and that has revealed Ethereum’s biggest problem, scalability.

With increased activity comes an increase in gas fees. This year has been the worst yet for gas prices on the network and is a serious issue for users and developers. Gas fees rose to an average of as high as $70 in May and $63 in November. The London Hard Fork protocol upgrade was supposed to help alleviate the gas fee issues. So far, it’s hard to tell if protocol upgrades are the best direction for Ethereum’s scalability. Conversely, L2 solutions augmented to Ethereum may be the only way to address scalability truly; Polygon is on the forefront of figuring it out.

2. Ethereum Spot ETF Approved In Canada

Canada appears to be more progressive than the US. After substantial success with a Bitcoin ETF, Canada became the first country to offer the world’s first direct custody Ethereum ETF.

In April, Canada launched not just one but THREE new Ethereum spot ETFs. The firms that Canadian regulators approved for Ethereum ETFs were Purpose Investments, Evolve ETFs, and CI Global Asset Management.  The CEO and founder of Purpose Investments was obviously bullish, and rightfully so:

“By launching the first ETF in the world that directly owns and provides exposure to ether, we are enabling every investor to have access to this unique opportunity and ecosystem.”

 

1. London Hard Fork (EIP-1559) Activated

Finally, the year’s biggest story was Ethereum activating the London Hard Fork upgrade with the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559 in August. The London Fork upgrade is one of the biggest protocol upgrades to Ethereum since its launch.

The upgrade aimed to strengthen the overall ecosystem of Ethereum and improve user experience by reducing gas fees. The upgrade was intended to be deflationary in nature by burning some ETH as a part of each transaction fee. Additionally, the “fee market” was changed from an auction-style to an algorithm that automatically sets the price of gas depending on the congestion of the network. So far, the upgrade did make the network more user-friendly by reducing the ratio of Ethereum’s price to gas fees, but the gas price is still an overall issue: see below. 

One year chart of median Ethereum gas prices (Blockchain)

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