Ethereum Istanbul Hard Fork Set To Launch On December 4: Official

Official news from the team behind the Ethereum Istanbul hard fork and the Ethereum Foundation including Peter Szilagyi as the head confirm that the expected date for the launch of the fork is December 4.

As two tweets shared in the Ethereum news posted on November 7 showed, it was Szilagyi who indicated that Istanbul will commence at block 9069000. He also provided Geth mainnet node operators with a link that will forward to a new maintenance release that is designed to begin the initialization of the hard fork.

Geth is the name that was given to one of the two most popular clients – and one which was used to operate nodes on the Ethereum network. The other name is Parity and is seen to update upon the activation of Istanbul, but is currently in the reviewing stage.

Right after the Constantinople upgrade which was completed in February this year, the Ethereum Istanbul hard fork represents the latest addition and the latest event in the network and its transition to the Ethereum 2.0 mode which is dubbed Berlin – and is intended to be Ethereum’s final upgrade set to take place in 2020.

The most significant feature of Berlin is rumored to be the implementation of a new programmatic proof-of-work (PoW) algorithm that is dubbed “ProgPoW” and which is intended to combat the main advantage ASIC miners have on the network. Here, “ASIC” refers to the mining hardware which uses the Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) chips which are tailored to efficiently mine crypto based on a specific hashing algorithm.

The Ethereum Istanbul hard fork is planned to be split into two stages, starting with a version that included a selection of six Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) for testnet integration in October of this year.

Earlier this month, the community members of Aragon are an open-source software project for creating Ethereum-based decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) which proclaimed against the protocol and its shift to ProgPow.

The Ethereum Istanbul hard fork would result in breaking of roughly 680 smart contracts on the Aragon platform. The CTO of Aragon recently said:

“The issue we’re going to have hasn’t been deemed important enough for this hard fork not to happen, which from our point of view is unfortunate [but] it’s a hard balance we understand.”