Last week, Ethereum activated its highly anticipated London hard fork on Thursday. The blockchain network's newest backward-incompatible hard fork includes 5 new Ethereum Improvement Proposals in EIPs 1559, 3554, 3529, 3198, and 3541, which are code upgrades to improve the network's user experience and value proposition. EIP 1559, the most closely watched reform, replaces Ethereum's auction-style fee market with a new algorithm that automatically sets the gas price for transactions.

The proposal aims to counterbalance the increasing supply of Ether (ETH), prevent economic abstraction of tokens, reduce fee volatility, and boost fee market efficiency. EIP 1559 will also offer greater block size variance, meaning block sizes can fluctuate up to 2 times the current maximum limit during high network congestion in order to improve the network's throughput. Finally, EIP 1559 reduces transaction fees for miners via the burning or deletion of ETH as part of fees, making them more reliant on block rewards, tips, and potentially other methods called "maximal extractable value" instead.

Here is the rest of the week in review:

Brian Quintenz, a Commissioner of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), tweeted Wednesday tweeted Wednesday that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) does not have jurisdiction over "pure commodities or their trading venues" including crypto assets: "Just so we're all clear here, the SEC has no authority over pure commodities or their trading venues, whether those commodities are wheat, gold, oil....or #crypto assets." The Republican Commissioner's comments came after SEC Chairman Gary Gensler earlier this week reiterated his view that stock tokens and "stable value tokens backed by securities" are considered securities, meaning they must be registered with the agency and their issuers must abide by federal securities law. The U.S. House Committee on Agriculture retweeted Quintenz's post, argued crypto is "bigger than the SEC," and urged Congress to "write the rules ... to protect investors AND innovation." Former CFTC Chairman Christopher Giancarlo agreed that the CFTC is the only agency with the experience to regulate cryptocurrency markets and urged the CFTC to nominate a new chair to draft sensible crypto rules.

The U.S. Senate continues to debate the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill, including a controversial crypto reporting provision that would raise about $28 billion in taxes. Senators Rob Portman (R-OH), Mark Warner (D-VA), and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) on Saturday updated their amendment to exclude proof-of-work and proof-of-stake miners and validators from broker requirements, as well as firms selling private key hardware or software wallets. In contrast, the crypto industry favors a competing amendment written by Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR), Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), and Pat Toomey (R-PA), which exempts more entities including software developers. The Biden administration reportedly supports the Portman amendment behind the scenes, much to the ire of the crypto sector that believes it would force miners and hardware and software developers to track transactions of individuals who are not their direct customers. The Senate is slated to accomplish final passage of the infrastructure bill by Tuesday at the latest.

Crypto prices climbed to $1.761 trillion this week, thanks to the Ethereum update. For the majors, all except Binance Coin (BNB) and stablecoins ended in the green. In the top 100, the biggest losers were Amp (AMP), down 16%, Theta Fuel (TFUEL), down 11%, and Telcoin (TEL), down 11%. The biggest gainers were Voyager Token (VGX), up 42%, Ravencoin (RVN), up 38%, and Elrond (EGLD), up 37%. Next week traders will watch how the infrastructure bill impacts Bitcoin (BTC) and the broader market.

The author owns a small amount of BTC.