On 5 August 2021, at 12:34 UTC, Ethereum activated the London hard fork at block 12,965,000. The headline EIP is 1559: instead of a pure first-price gas auction, the protocol posts a base fee that moves with demand and burns it. Users may add a priority fee (a tip) so miners pick them. Other London items (including a difficulty-bomb delay) are in the same fork. This is still proof of work. The Merge is September 2022. Blobs and quiet layer-2 fees are Dencun, 2024. Do not clone those URLs onto this morning.
Wallets that speak the new transaction type can set a max fee and a max tip and stop guessing a single gas price quite as blindly. Legacy transactions still work; they just do not get the new semantics. Ultrasound-style dashboards will count burned ether by lunchtime. That is issuance arithmetic, not a promise that your swap is cheap.
What happened
When blocks are full, the base fee rises. When they are empty, it falls. Burning does not cap the price of inclusion; it changes who receives that slice of the bid. Miners keep the tip and the block reward. Users still compete. A “fee market reform” that people sell as “Ethereum is deflationary now” is a story about net issuance over a long window, not about today’s NFT mint.
Why it matters
Predictable base fees are a product improvement. They are not a personality transplant for the chain. If you were waiting for proof of stake, you are still waiting. See ethereum without the jargon. See the later Merge piece when you want consensus, not the meter.
What happens next
Burn dashboards, miner complaints, and a year of people treating 1559 as the Merge. We will not forecast ETH supply. Nothing here is an instruction to buy, sell, or spend ether.
