On April 15, the Ethereum network welcomed hardfork Berlin. On the eve of the update, the ETH rate reached another all-time high.

The Berlin update was rolled out to the Ethereum network on April 15 at block #12,244,000. The update contains four proposals to improve the Ethereum blockchain and was aimed at optimizing gas use and preventing DoS attacks. EIP-2565 and EIP-2929 are changing the process for calculating the cost of transaction fees on the network, and EIP-2930 and EIP-2718 are introducing new types of transactions.

A few hours after the hard fork, the Ethereum network crashed. Ethereum nodes using the OpenEthereum client stopped working. OpenEthereum is the second most popular client among Ethereum node holders. According to ethernodes, it accounts for about 12% of the active network. It was created by developers from the startup Parity. Also, a number of services did not function, for example, the Etherscan block browser. The bug did not affect the operation of nodes on the main Geth client.

Ethereum developers quickly fixed the bug by releasing OpenEthereum version 3.2.2.

Against the background of the update and despite the technical difficulties, the ETH rate updated another all-time maximum, rising to $2487.

The next update on the Ethereum network is called London and is scheduled for July 2021. Its main improvement, EIP-1559, will introduce dynamic block size, change the principle of generating fees and start burning ETH. This will presumably lower the fees for conducting transactions on the network.