EIP-1559
EIP-1559 (August 2021) rewrote Ethereum's fee market: instead of blind first-price auctions, each block has an algorithmic base fee that gets burned, plus
EIP-1559 (August 2021) rewrote Ethereum’s fee market: instead of blind first-price auctions, each block has an algorithmic base fee that gets burned, plus an optional tip. Fees became predictable; ETH gained a burn mechanism.
Why it matters
It’s the rare upgrade that improved UX *and* monetary policy at once — wallets can estimate fees reliably, and heavy usage now shrinks supply. It didn’t lower fees on average (a persistent myth — only scaling does that), but it made them legible, which for users and analysts matters almost as much.