Everything You Need to Know About Ethereum’s Berlin Upgrade

Abstract: Ethereum Berlin Upgrade is expected to take place at around 4:00 pm Beijing time on April 15th. As a user, what preparations do you need to make? The long-delayed Ethereum Berlin Upgrade is about to go live. This is the latest upgrade after Ethereum Istanbul and Mur Glacier upgrades. Due to the over-centralization of the Geth client, the Berlin hard fork, which was originally expected to be launched in July 2020, has been postponed...

Ethereum Berlin upgrade is expected to take place around 4 pm Beijing time on April 15th. As a user, what preparations do you need to make?

The long-delayed Ethereum Berlin Upgrade is about to go live. This is the latest upgrade after Ethereum Istanbul and Mur Glacier upgrades. Due to the excessive centralization of the Geth client, the Berlin hard fork, which was originally expected to be launched in July 2020, has been postponed until now.

The Berlin upgrade is scheduled to go live at the Ethereum mainnet block height of 12244000. The specific time may be advanced or delayed due to fluctuations in block time. It is currently expected to occur around 4:00 p.m. on April 15, Beijing time.

Why Berlin?

Berlin is just a name for this Ethereum network upgrade. After Istanbul, all Ethereum network upgrades will be named after the cities where Devcon is held (Berlin, London, Shanghai, etc.) and in order.

What does the Berlin upgrade mean?

The Berlin upgrade means a change to Ethereum's underlying protocol.

The decentralized nature of Ethereum makes network upgrades a difficult problem, requiring the community and Ethereum client developers to reach a consensus on certain protocol changes. The consensus protocol changes will be written into various Ethereum clients, such as Geth, Open Ethereum, Besu and Nethermind, to initiate network upgrades at a specific block height.

The Berlin upgrade mainly optimizes the performance of Ethereum's main network, optimizes contracts, covers gas efficiency, updates to the way the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) reads code, and prevents denial of service (DDOS) attacks. Before being deployed to the main network, the upgrade will first run on the Ropsten, Goerli and Rinkeby test networks.

What updates are included in the Berlin Update?

This upgrade includes at least five EIPs, namely EIP-2565, EIP-2315, EIP-2929, EIP-2718 and EIP-2930. However, at the 107th core developer meeting on March 5, all agreed to remove EIP-2315 from the upgrade list.

EIP-2565: Reduce the cost of ModExp precompiled contracts

This proposal is a repricing of the previous EIP-198, which introduced a precompiled module for modular exponentiation operations, while EIP-2565 reduces the gas cost of this module to be on par with the cost of performing other operations.

Reference: https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-2565

EIP-2929: Increase gas consumption for state access opcodes

This EIP increases the gas consumption (within a transaction) of the first call to SLOAD, CALL, BALANCE, EXT , and SELFDESTRUCT by about 3 times, but this high cost is only triggered once for any address or storage slot.

Increasing the gas consumption of these operations is intended to mitigate the remaining DoS attack surface of the Ethereum protocol. In addition, EIP-2929 will also help limit the size of witness data in the environment after the stateless Ethereum is implemented.

Reference: https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-2929

EIP-2930: Optional access lists

In order to alleviate the problem of increased gas consumption caused by EIP-2929, the Berlin upgrade package introduced EIP-2930. EIP-2930 allows users to specify an "access list" when submitting a transaction to allow things to indicate the states they plan to access, so as to use a gas fee lower than that specified by EIP-2929.

Reference: https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-2930

EIP-2718: Standardized transaction types

This EIP introduces a new transaction type and supports multiple transaction types at the protocol level to enable support for multiple transaction types more conveniently.

In the early days of the Ethereum mainnet, there was only one transaction type with fields TO and Data. In November 2016, the Ethereum network's need for transaction types changed, and the Pseudo-Dragon hard fork incorporated EIP-155 to prevent replay attacks. Although EIP-2718 cannot solve the complexity brought by EIP-155, it effectively prevents the introduction of more complexity and makes the implementation of EIP-1599 easier.

Reference: https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-2718

"The Berlin Upgrade Overiew"

As a user, what preparations do you need to make?

As an Ethereum user or ETH holder, you do not need to do anything unless your exchange or wallet provider notifies you that additional steps are required.

As a node operator or miner, you need to download the latest version of the Ethereum client. Considering the variability of block time, it is recommended to upgrade a few days before the expected date. After the Berlin upgrade, non-upgraded nodes will remain on the old chain that is incompatible with the new chain, and will not be able to send ETH to the upgraded Ethereum network, and will not be able to operate smart contracts in the upgraded Ethereum network.

Download address:

* Go-ethereum (Geth) v1.10.1

* OpenEthereum (fka Parity) v3.2.0

* Nethermind v1.10.31

* Besu v21.1.2

* EthereumJS VM v5.2.0

Related reading: Ethereum Berlin Upgrade Announcement

Ethereum Upgrade Roadmap: EIP-1559 and ETH2 Merger

In addition to the upcoming Berlin upgrade, Ethereum 2021 will also see the London upgrade (expected in July) and the Shanghai upgrade (expected in October).

The London upgrade will deploy the controversial EIP-1559 on the mainnet. Since the London upgrade is more difficult and the implementation and testing time are shorter than previous upgrades, the core developers are trying to narrow the scope of the London upgrade so that it can be completed on time.

EIPs that did not make it into the London upgrade may make it into the Shanghai upgrade (possibly including EIP-3298 or EIP-3322). Ethereum developers are currently discussing the priority of the Shanghai upgrade. One option is that the Shanghai upgrade will be launched as another functional fork, which includes EIPs that are not included in the London upgrade. Another option is to adopt Vitliak Buterin's fast merge proposal and launch the Shanghai upgrade as a merge of Eth1 <> Eth2. If the first option is adopted and the Shanghai upgrade is launched as a functional fork, it may be launched in October 2021. If it is the latter, it will be postponed to a later time.

Reference reading: "For those who are unclear on big things happening soon in the Ethereum ecosystem" "Proposal to prioritize The Merge after London" "AllCoreDevs Update 001"

References: "What changes are there in the Ethereum Berlin upgrade? Learn about the 4 EIP proposals" "A quick overview of the key points of the Ethereum Berlin upgrade: first deployed to the Ropsten test network, the main network is scheduled to be upgraded on April 14"