Ethereum Istanbul Blockchain Upgrade Is Now One Day Away

Christmas is coming earlier this season for users of Ethereum (ETH). The latest crypto news show that the blockchain behind the second largest cryptocurrency is about to see the Ethereum Istanbul blockchain upgrade (hard fork) which is one of the most important updates for the network.

According to Etherscan which is an Ethereum-centric data and information platform, Istanbul is set to activate on Block #9069000 and is expected to take place around 18 hours away from the time of writing this post.

If you are still wondering why the Ethereum Istanbul blockchain upgrade is important, you should know that there will be six Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) which were chosen from a pool of more than 30 candidates. Below, we are listing each of them with a summary on why it is important.

• EIP 1679: An EIP listing the protocol changes which will come as standard in Istanbul. That’s all.
• EIP-2200: This EIP will modify how the cost of the storage of data is calculated in Ethereum’s Virtual Machine, and will also give smart contracts the ability to execute more functions.
• EIP-1884: This EIP will modify the transaction cost of some EVM opcodes “to prevent spamming attacks and to and to balance the amount of computation in each block better.”
• EIP-2028: This EIP will allow for zero-knowledge SNARKs and STARKs technology cheaper on the Ethereum blockchain, reducing the cost of “calling data within outputs.”
• EIP-1344: This EIP will “add a way for contracts to keep track of the Ethereum chain they are on.”
• EIP-1108: This EIP will make zero-knowledge SNARKs cheaper, allowing for cheaper scaling and privacy technologies.
• EIP-152: “Adds the ability to verify the Equihash PoW within an ethereum contract. This will enable a relay and atomic-swap transactions between Zcash and Ethereum.”

Even though the Ethereum Istanbul upgrade is approaching, it appears that not all node runners are ready for the upgrade. We can see that the Ethereum news today show that a mere 48% of the nodes running the most popular client (Geth) are ready to adopt Istanbul while 40% of the ones running the other client (Parity) are ready for the upgrade.

“If you are using an Ethereum client that is not updated to the latest version (listed above), your client will sync to the pre-fork blockchain once the upgrade occurs. You will be stuck on an incompatible chain following the old rules and you will be unable to send ether or operate on the post-upgrade network,” an excerpt from a blog post on the Ethereum Foundation website notes.