The most recent hard fork to Ethereum (London) included 5 Improvement Proposals (EIPs). The biggest headline EIP was EIP-1559 which promised to reign in the inflation of ETH by sending a base-fee of transactions to a burn address and removing them from circulation. This base fee would be dynamically set based on the previous blocks, depending on how full (or not) the blocks were.

There was a lot of buzz early on about how it would might make gas fees cheaper, but that was due to a slightly misinterpreted take on the concept that many people were overpaying due to the lack of insight into the spread of fee bids within a block and the lack of connection from one block's fee spread to the following block. Thus, many people were potentially overpaying or overbidding, without any ability to get good information about what a competitive bid would look like.

The base-fee (and max bid) would introduce some tools to give users and the network some insight into what would be competitive bids. The base fee would be calculated based on recent historic network usage, priority could be added as fee tips for those who needed it, and the max-fee would limit the top amount that you wanted to pay.

All great inclusions, but the main purpose was to introduce consistency and stability into the transaction fee costs and the potential for lower gas fees was due to the reduction in overpaying due to lack of information about gas price trends.

Sadly.. over this past week, we've seen some hefty base fees, including this nice one from yesterday afternoon. Most of it is due to people going crazy about this or that limited NFT launch. Honestly, I will be glad when this phase of growing up is over... people that are involved might not realise it, but it is the classic "newly rich" doing stupidly extravagant things because they could. It is decadence at its finest, and the sort of thing that characterised the wealth gaps preceding the Great Depression eras and all of that. It isn't something to be celebrated...

One, of the potential gas fee culprits might have been the launch of this project and the ability to mint one from 10000 limited planets.

... or more likely, SpacePoggers. Sigh... the promise of decentralisation and decentralised networks wasn't this... that rich YouTube influencers could flip NFTs to show off AMAZING 500k profits (at an initial 250k buy in price...). These people just make me sick...

.. or maybe I'm having a little bit of a crank out, because I still have a pre-1559 transaction that is still waiting to be picked up and included. At 14 gwei, that isn't going to be anytime soon. But I'm in no hurry for this particular wallet address. It can take as long as it needs, I don't have any pressing transactions (yet...) that need to be done, so I will just let it sit there for week or two longer.

Well, this morning saw a bit more normality drop back into the Eth basefee. I'm almost tempted to bump up my bid to be more competitive with this lower base fee. On the other hand, I can just wait for the weekend... normally those times bring in a bit lower fee... except for this last weekend!

Speaking of Ethereum, I'm glad I managed to lock in a good chunk of staking before the craziness of limited cult NFTs took off again. This particular one, Iluvium (ILV), has done a pretty nice run in the last few days... and considering that I picked it up for free (community airdrop), I definitely have no complaints. It is all locked in staking and earning... and the game itself is due for a Q3 launch. It actually looks pretty decent, so I'm very curious to see when we will be able to start giving it a go. It is going to launch on Immutable X, so we will be safe from the ETH gas fee problem whilst still being secured by the L1.

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