The Ethereum Berlin upgrade and SwissBorg
Anthony Lesoismier
Chief Strategy Officer
The next Ethereum network upgrade - Berlin - is expected to take place at Ethereum block height 12,244,000, or at approximately 15 April 2021 at 9:36 AM UTC.
SwissBorg will support the upgrade and hard fork. For this reason, deposits and withdrawals of ETH and ERC-20 tokens will be temporarily suspended starting from15 April 2021 at 8:30 AM UTC.
What is the Ethereum Berlin upgrade?
The Berlin upgrade intends to address some of the challenges of the Ethereum ecosystem, mainly increased fees and complex transaction processes.
High transaction fees have become an increasing problem in recent history due to the rise in Ethereum’s price and the growing demand for assets on the Ethereum network. Transaction fees reached an all-time high of nearly $40 in February.
The Berlin will feature four protocols:
- EIP-2565 - lower the cost of the ModExp precompile, which helps calculate gas prices
- EIP-2965 - increase certain gas costs when used for the first time in a transaction
- EIP-2718 - introduce a new transaction type that will support multiple transactions
- EIP-2930 - add a transaction type with access lists, which will mitigate some of the gas cost increases introduced by EIP-2929
The Berlin upgrade is the next step towards ETH 2.0, which will see the network transition from a Proof of Work to a Proof of Stake model, as well as sharding, which will allow for the network to be divided into multiple sub-networks (shards) and will enable a dramatic increase in throughput volumes.
How will it affect SwissBorg users?
As mentioned above, SwissBorg will support the upgrade and hard fork. During the upgrade, deposits and withdrawals of ETH and ERC-20 tokens will be suspended; however, all other functionality of the SwissBorg app (exchanges, Smart Yield subscriptions and redemptions, asset analysis and Portfolio Analytics) will remain functional.
The suspension will start from 15 April 2021 at 8:30 AM UTC, and we will reopen deposits and withdrawals once we deem the network to be stable.
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