Gray Glacier hard fork

Mainnet 2022-06-30

The difficulty bomb was delayed.

What changed

Users
There was no visible change. The difficulty bomb is a mechanism that raises proof-of-work (PoW) mining difficulty steeply over time, slowing block production. This fork pushed back the point at which the bomb takes effect. As a result, users could use the network as usual, without longer block intervals or slower transaction processing. The fork bought time until The Merge, the move to proof of stake.
Wallet & app developers
Nothing changed directly. There were no new opcodes, transaction types, or node API (RPC) changes, so contract and wallet code did not need to be modified. Because block intervals stayed normal, logic based on block numbers or block times kept working as before. There was no need to test or redeploy around the fork.
Node operators
Execution clients had to be upgraded to a version that supports Gray Glacier. The only change was a single reference block number used in the difficulty calculation, but nodes that did not update would calculate difficulty differently after the fork block and follow a different chain. The update had to be completed before the mainnet activation on June 30, 2022. No other configuration or operational changes were needed.

Key EIPs

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