Ethereum’s Istanbul Hard Fork Set To Happen On December 4

Ethereum’s Istanbul hard fork and network upgrade will happen on December 4 where the network will receive efficiencies and new compatibility with Zcash but most importantly, the element that everyone was expecting, will be on hold until early next year as we are reading further in the ETH News.

The developers of the network are aiming to unleash the blockchain’s latest upgrade which is the Istanbul hard fork on December 4. Istanbul promises to improve the network’s security and efficiency but also plans to make Ethereum ASIC-resistant. However the latter is on hold until early next year. The date for Istanbul was set during the core developer call on October 25 and was firmed up by Peter Szilagy via Twitter on Thursday. He is a core developer as well and he tweeted that Geth v1.9.7 which will enable Ethereum’s Istanbul hard fork has been officially released.

Istanbul is the latest hard fork in the network’s eventual transition to 2.0 which will begin to roll out somewhere in early 2020. The update will provide fixes and upgrades to the world’s second-largest blockchain network and will be implemented in two parts. The first part- Istanbul, will take place on December 4 and the second one dubbed Berlin will happen during the first quarter of 2020. These improvements are set to optimize the network and to lower the gas costs but also increase compatibility with Zcash and address scalability. Also, the contracts will be allowed to introduce more creative functions as well.

The most controversial change for the network which is the Ethereum Improvement Proposal 1884 will increase the cost of recalling data on the ETH blockchain for the application developers. As the size of the blockchain increases, these operations could overload the network. Ethereum core developers have agreed that all of the increased fees will better safeguard the platform from possible denial-of-service or spam attacks.

In September, the leaders from governance platform Aragon noted some concerts that the code changes will bring to about 680 contracts that manage the governance of decentralized applications that are run on the ETH blockchain. The group also claimed that further upgrades would be needed to ensure that decentralized autonomous organizations built on the Aragon platform, will run smoothly. Istanbul will also enforce new fork upgrades to avoid the users getting left using older versions of the blockchain.

Ethereum’s last system upgrade Constantinople, had to be delayed because of the critical code vulnerability discovered only 48 hours before the rollout.