Ethereum London upgrade launches on testnet as 100K staked in a day on Eth2

Ethereum’s forthcoming London upgrade, containing the highly-anticipated Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559, has been deployed on the Ropsten testnet.

Following the June 24 launch on Ropsten, London is now expected to progress through Ethereum’s Goerli, Rinkeby, and Kovan testnets at roughly weekly intervals — from which point the Ethereum community expects a date for mainnet deployment to firm up.

The new upgrade will see transaction fees burned. According EIP-1559 tracking website, Watch the Burn, roughly 88,500 testnet ETH nominally worth $177.6 million has been burned on Ropsten over the day since London’s deployment.

The high rate of Ether being burned on Ropsten has reignited discussion regarding whether EIP-1559 will render Ethereum deflationary — where more ETH is destroyed than new supply enters into circulation — and what this could mean for Ethereum’s price moving forward.

However, EIP-1559 is not the only upgrade that the community is looking forward to from London, with David Mihal of CryptoFees describing EIP-3074 as “fixing one of Ethereum’s most overlooked security issues” to do with approvals.

Related: A London tour guide: What the EIP-1559 hard fork promises for Ethereum

Coincidentally or not, crypto data aggregator, CryptoQuant, identified that 100,000 Ether had been deposited into Eth2's staking contract around the same time as the launch, worth roughly $200 million.

CryptoQuant also noted that more than 5% of ETH’s supply is currently locked in staking worth approximately $11.75 billion.