Berlin is planned to become effective at block 12,244,000 (April 14) on the Ethereum mainnet, as per info provided by Tim Beiko.
Ropsten, the foremost testnet to be overhauled, is planned for March 10, The Goerli and Rinkeby networks are anticipated to undergo overhaul in weekly increments on March 17 and March 24, respectively.
Ethereum node operators have been advised to prepare for the upgrade that is compatible with Berlin variant. There will three testnets before the mainnet on April 7. Beiko detailed:
“Ethereum node operators should upgrade their nodes prior to the fork block on the networks they want to participate in. Due to block time variability, it is recommended to update several days before the expected date.”
It should be noted that wallet service providers, Ether (ETH) token holders and cryptocurrency exchanges need not take any measures for the upgrade.
Overall, there will be four amendments to the prevailing protocol and are referred to as the Ethereum Improvement Protocols (EIPs), which will be incorporated via Berlin. They include:
EIP-2565, which lowers the cost of the ModExp precompile
EIP-2929, which increases certain gas costs
EIP-2718, which introduces a new transaction type
EIP-2930, which includes a transaction type with optional access lists.
Berlin upgrade follows the Istanbul and Muir Glacier overhaul, which was completed in December 2019 and January 2020, respectively. The latest protocol upgrade was named with Berlin based Devcon 0 event in mind. The forthcoming upgrade of Ethereum is named as London, where Devcon 1 took place.
The native crypto of Ethereum blockchain i.e., Ether (ETH) continues to remain bullish following the implementation of Ethereum 2.0 protocol in December last year. Eth2 sets in motion a multiyear overhaul of the blockchain network as it makes efforts to transform into a proof-of-stake model from the prevailing proof-of-work consensus protocol.
At the time of writing this article, Ether was trading at $1,846.20, reflecting a gain of 7.2% in the past 24 hours. The cryptocurrency has a market value of $212.12 billion.