The Ethereum network will undergo a major upgrade on Aug. 4, as the long-awaited London hard fork is expected to launch at block 12,965,000. The transition is part of a roadmap leading to the Ethereum 2.0 release, which aims to migrate the network to a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism.
By no longer depending on the intense energy-consumption mining, the main goal is to drastically increase the network's capacity by using parallel processing, also known as sharding.