EIP-1559

EIP-1559 went live in the London hard fork, at block 12,965,000, on 5 August 2021. Each block carries a base fee set by the protocol according to how full the previous block was relative to a gas target (half the gas limit): if the target was exceeded, the base fee rises up to 12.5% per block, and if it fell short, it drops. That base fee is burned, meaning it is destroyed rather than paid to the validator, removing ETH from circulation. The user sets a maxFeePerGas (total ceiling) and a maxPriorityFeePerGas (tip), pays the base fee plus the tip, and is refunded the difference. Fees are denominated in gwei, the practical unit for pricing gas.

Its value lies in predictability: the algorithmic base fee makes gas estimation more stable than the old auction. The burn also changed ETH's monetary policy; combined with the reduced issuance after The Merge (the move to proof of stake, 15 September 2022), it can leave ETH net deflationary in high-activity periods, though this depends on demand and is not guaranteed. The model has become the reference inherited by L2s and EVM forks.

The authors include Vitalik Buterin, Eric Conner, Rick Dudley, Matthew Slipper, Ian Norden and Abdelhamid Bakhta. The original case is Ethereum mainnet. Arbitrum and Optimism adopt 1559-style fee models for their L2 gas, Optimism with its own mechanism that redirects part of the fees; Polygon PoS implemented EIP-1559 with a burn in its January 2022 hard fork. The later gas-abstraction layer, with ERC-4337 paymasters and EIP-7702 (included in Pectra, mainnet on 7 May 2025), operates on top of this model.