Ethereum London Hard Fork Is Coming to Ethereum Classic As “Mystique”

The London hard fork was a momentous event for Ethereum and hopefully, it will be the same for Ethereum Classic. The 5-year old Ethereum hard forked chain is readying up for its scheduled February 14 release for ECIP – 1104

The “Mystique” Fork

Ethereum Classic Improvement Protocol (ECIP) – 1104 was expected to bring a host of changes to the mainnet as it supposedly follows the same protocols of Ethereum’s London hard fork.

However, that may not be the case as of the 5 major Ethereum Improvement Protocols (EIP) only 2 are being included in the Mystique hard fork.

The first is EIP 3529 which specifies the alternative refund reduction in which the gas price will be adjusted so that they aren’t too high for people to exploit the existing refund mechanism.

The second EIP to be implemented is 3541 which determines that no future contract with the 0xEF prefix will be deployed on the Ethereum Classic chain. In doing so, an error message will be displayed witing ECIP 1104 as the reason for the rejection.

The EIPs that have been omitted include the most controversial change to Ethereum, the EIP 1559 which introduced the fee burn mechanism as well the EIP 3228 which was responsible for the difficulty bomb delay.

As per the details mentioned by Ethereum Classic, the fee burn mechanism is not needed on the ETC chain since its implementation would create conflict with the existing monetary policy introduced in ECIP 1017.

Additionally, since Ethereum Classic does not intend on deploying the difficulty bomb ever on the chain, bringing a bomb delay would be useless.

As mentioned in the recent update, at the moment there is just 35% readiness for the Mystique fork. Usually, nodes are observed to be ready by the time activation gets closer and for the same reason before February 13, 60% – 70% readiness is expected.

Ethereum’s Difficulty Bomb

While Ethereum Classic gets prepared for the first fork of 2022, its parent chain Ethereum is getting closer to its rescheduled difficulty bomb.

Expected to be implemented by June this year, the difficulty bomb will officially shift Ethereum’s mining protocol from the proof of work model to proof of stake, reducing power consumption by 99%.

Presently, the anticipated hard fork hasn’t really affected ETC or ETH’s price movement in any significant way as they both seem to be following the broader market’s cues and moving sideways.