Ethereum's Vitalik Buterin Says EIP 1559 'Most Important Part of London,' Network Is Burning $16K in ETH per Minute

The Ethereum blockchain has completed the highly anticipated London upgrade on Thursday and ether fans have been discussing the protocol’s burn rate with great fervor following the fork.

5.9 Ether Is Burned Every Minute, Vitalik Buterin ‘Confident’ About the future after London

At press time, Ethereum is burning 5.9 ether per minute or $16.8K using today’s exchange rates against the U.S. dollar. Meanwhile, in a recent interview from Singapore, Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin said the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) “1559 is definitely the most important part of London.”

On Thursday morning around 8:30 a.m. (EDT) on August 5, the long-awaited Ethereum London hard fork took place and the blockchain was successfully upgraded. The community was ecstatic, to say the least, and on Twitter, terms like “ethereum” and “EIP1559” started trending.

Of course, the most topical conversation about the London upgrade was EIP-1559: The fee market change for ETH 1.0 chain. The EIP essentially changes the algorithm tethered to the base fee per gas in the protocol and it burns the base fee per gas.

There are numerous websites where ether fans can watch the burn rate stemming from the latest EIP-1559 ruleset change. At the time of writing, more than $16K or 5.90 ETH is burned by this mechanism every minute. On the low end of the spectrum, the burn rate has been around $8,103 or 2.78 ETH per minute. Ethereum evangelists like this concept because they believe it will essentially make the crypto asset deflationary over time.

Vitalik Buterin spoke about the London upgrade with Bloomberg from Singapore and told the finance reporter Matthew Leising he was “confident” about the future after London. “Now it gets much easier to send a transaction that will get included in the next block and that’s very important to user experience,” Buterin said.

Gas Fees Spiked, Ether Jumps Over 16% This Week

However, on the downside, ETH users did notice that the average ETH transaction fee jumped following the fork. For instance, on August 2, the average fee was around $8.39 per transaction but on Friday following the upgrade, the average ether gas fee is $14.60. Since the London upgrade was activated, Ethereum’s fee burn rate and the rising gas fees have taken over the conversations. A decent number of people are also talking about ETH’s current market rally as well.

Ethereum (ETH) is up over 3% today and 17.55% over the last seven days. Against the leading crypto asset bitcoin (BTC) during the week ETH has rallied 16.50%. Pitted against the U.S. dollar, ethereum has jumped 24% over the last month, and trailing 12-month stats show ETH has captured triple-digit gains (628.27%).