Ethereum’s Next System Upgrade Istanbul Will Arrive On December 4

Ethereum’s next system upgrade – The Istanbul upgrade, will arrive on December 4 according to the latest announcements that we have in our Ethereum news today.

This decision was brought up during the ethereum core developer call on October 25 and later on Friday, Danno Ferrin who is the blockchain protocol engineer at Ethereum venture studio ConsenSys, proposed activating Istanbul at the block number 9,056,000 in accordance with the targeted date on December 4. Ferrin wrote after the meeting:

 “From when I calculated … at 14-second block times its 245,544.5 blocks, which puts noon UTC at block 9,055,928.5. So I would propose 9,056,000 as the Istanbul mainnet block target. Please check my math.’’

During the call, the developers also agreed that in the case of any unexpected issues with the upgrade software between now and the week of December 4, Ethereum’s next system upgrade activation will be delayed one month to January 8:

 “The thing about the [Jan.8] backstop date is that if we’re going to ship and change the time, we have to build a new client … and get everyone to install the client. At least four weeks for a re-spin is necessary.”

During the last system upgrade, Constantinopole, Ethereum developers had the need to delay the mainnet activation of the upgrade for more than a month due to a crucial code vulnerability discovered just 48 hours before the Constantinople’s scheduled roll-out. This time, Ethereum core developers are covering all their bases with the pre-determined backstop dates if in the future any unforeseen circumstances occur. The foundation developer Piper Merriam stated:

 “There’s nothing here that says [we can’t launch] the first week of December. We’re just setting some easy backstop dates now and we can always change our mind later if needed.”

Istanbul is expected to introduce six backward-incompatible code changes to the largest blockchain network in the world. the most controversial among them is the Ethereum Improvement Proposal 1884 which will increase the computational costs of recalling data about the ethereum blockchain for application developers. In the meantime, the increased fees will keep safe the $18 billion platform from the potential denial of service attacks or spam.

The other code changes will introduce more pricing adjustments to the ethereum platform as well as new code operations that application developers can leverage to verify the blockchain data quickly and more efficient.