Ethereum London Hard Fork to Make Some Tokens Worthless
In brief The next Ethereum upgrade will happen during the first week of August. It includes EIP-3529, a code update that does away with gas refunds. That makes gas tokens functionless. 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 arent 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. 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