The highly-anticipated London hard fork upgrade has reportedly gone live across the Ethereum network, with ETH showing signs of a plan of turning itself into a deflationary asset.

Specifically, The London hard fork reportedly happened nearly according to the predetermined timeline, at 12:33 pm UTC on Thursday at block height 12,965,00, rolling out the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559.

With the upgrade released, Ethereum will reportedly go through a major overhaul of the network’s transaction fee market now, as well as different additional parameters, nominally gas refunds, among others.

Under EIP-1559, every Ether-based transaction will reportedly be conducted with the involvement of burning the base fee, which brings down the Ether (ETH) circulating supply in an automated manner. 

Numerous exchanges, including Binance, reportedly disclosed details of a temporary downtime for deposit and withdrawals features across the Ethereum network, because of the London hard fork.

A few proponents of the upgrade reportedly revealed that it will greatly increase the possibility of Ether turning into a deflationary asset, as each transaction will trigger a sum of the overall coin supply to be taken out of circulation permanently. 

Ethereum co-founder and ConsenSys founder Joseph Lubin reportedly regarded the London upgrade as the next step in the journey of helping Ether achieve the status of “ultrasound money.”

The London upgrade and the subsequent activation of EIP-1559 are milestones in a certain way, in the transition to Ethereum 2.0, which will transform the network’s current nature as a proof-of-work consensus to a proof-of-stake consensus.