Ethereum Istanbul Is Now Live: Faster, But Is It The ‘World Computer’?

Vitalik Buterin is in the cryptocurrency news today for announcing that Ethereum Istanbul is now live and will support 3,000 transactions per second after the upcoming Istanbul fork. Everyone expected this update and now that it is all live, we can see an official post from the founder himself – shared via Twitter.

Congrats to @sparkpool_eth for mining the Istanbul fork block!

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) December 8, 2019

Buterin congratulated the team for mining the Istanbul hard fork and all…But for those of you who really want to understand the importance of it, we need to go back to a tweet he shared in November where he described what Ethereum Istanbul brings to the table.

As he said back then, the hard fork will bring account abstraction, first-class smart contract wllets, casper proof of stake, resource-efficient light clients, optimistic rollup, 3000+ TPS post-Istanbul, non-interactive ZKPs for privacy and scalability, rewarded staking as well as many other updates which will roll after the sharding.

Now that Ethereum Istanbul is live, the big question is whether it will unleash a new wave of Ethereum creativity? So far, the ETH news show that the situation is still but there may be a surge in traffic on the Ethereum network. This could definitely increase and influence the price of ETH soon.

The conventional wisdom right now shows that Ethereum is too slow. This is the realistic picture – and it seems to be sufficiently fast for financial services. The mistake people are making saying that “Ethereum is slow,” however, is a misunderstanding. ETH works because users want to pay (in the form of “gas) and perform computations.

If the network is congested, it means that there are more people who want to pay to have ETH computations than there are the capacity to allow it. Ethereum Istanbul is live now and the consensus is a bit faster, but the term “World computer” is still hyperbolic as it suggests that there could be a singular device handling the world’s computational needs.

One of the best things about this hard fork is the increased capacity of the existing apps and the enabling of similar apps to run on Ethereum. Still, analysts believe that the performance increase is still unlikely to produce types of applications which are not seen today.