Ethereum's Berlin Hard Fork was Live.

 The Berlin hard fork of Ethereum went live on Thursday at block 12,244,000.

The Berlin hard fork is a network update that includes four Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) that change gas prices and introduce new transaction forms. The update serves as a precursor to the much larger London hard fork, which will trigger EIP 1559, a significant (and divisive) improvement to Ethereum's fee structure.

The EIPs are as follows:

• EIP-2565, which lowers the cost of gas for a particular form of transaction that employs modular exponentiation.

• EIP-2718 uses so-called "envelope transactions" to make all transaction forms "backwards compatible," allowing new transaction logic to be added to Ethereum.

• EIP-2930 is a new transaction form (made possible by EIP-2718's envelope transactions) that enables users to construct a pre-populated list of addresses and amounts for potential transactions in order to save money on gas.

The Berlin hard fork, named after the German city that hosted the first Ethereum DevCon, was originally planned for June or July 2020, but was postponed due to concerns about centralization surrounding the Geth client, which is used by the majority of Ethereum nodes.