Barring any unexpected turns of events, Ethereum’s London hard fork should take place on block 12,965,000. This is a much-anticipated event and it seems that 70% of the nodes are prepared for it.

• Data ethernodes reveals that 70% of the Ethereum nodes are prepared for the London hard fork that’s supposed to take place very soon.

• According to the latest official blog post from Ethereum, the hard fork should go live on block 12,965,000.
• To be compatible with the upgrade, node operators will need to update their client version.
• In essence, the versions that support London on Ethereum’s mainnet are Besu 21.7.1, OpenEthereum v3.3.0-rc.4, formerly known as Parity, and EthereumJS VM v.5.5.0.
• One of the most anticipated improvement proposals that will be incorporated with the hardfork is the EIP-1559.
• As CryptoPotato reported earlier in the year, the proposal is essentially “a transaction pricing mechanism that includes fixed-per-block network fee that is burned and dynamically expands/contracts block sizes to deal with transient congestion.”
• Many see this as a solution to the high-priced Ethereum gas fees. Yet, some remain skeptical.
• In a report from March this year, CoinMetrics argued that the EIP might not provide the solution many anticipate.

High transaction fees are fundamentally a scalability problem. As Ethereum’s block processing capacity is limited to a few hundred transactions per block (on average), there will be continued high transaction fees. As long as there is high competition for block space, gas prices will remain high.