Istanbul Upgrade: Will It Revive ETH’s Smashed Price?

The Ethereum news today bring a very interesting topic – the Istanbul upgrade – which is the main hope that traders have right now when seeing the battered ETH price. In times when there is only a little hope and when Ethereum is moving independently of Bitcoin, traders are wondering if the newest upgrade is able to improve the price – as much as it is able to ramp up the technology behind ETH.

As the cryptocurrency news show, the second largest cryptocurrency by market cap has had a tough week. It managed to drop from a high of $220 late last week to a monthly low of $165 yesterday – plunging by 25% in less than a week. As a testament to the drop, it also presented extreme volatility and has yet to break free.

The ETH charts today show that the cryptocurrency is at a five month low of $170 and is looking to make further losses if Bitcoin revisits the $7,000 price range. The only hope for the $200 mark is the Istanbul upgrade which is scheduled soon.

For those of you who don’t follow the ETH news, the Istanbul upgrade for ETH is basically an upgrade that is seen as bullish. Even though the newly printed rule book has not applied to altcoins this year, the upgrade dubbed Istanbul is scheduled to be rolled out over the coming months – and will include a number of Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) but needs to be deployed on testnets before a smooth mainnet hard fork.

From another perspective, the Istanbul upgrade for ETH is the 8th network upgrade which will hit the Ropsten and Goerli test networks next month as the official Medium post noted. In November and December, it is expected for us to see rollouts on the Rinkeby and Kovan testnets before the mainnet launch which is scheduled for early 2020.

What’s also interesting is the comments by the co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin. When asked about the Istanbul upgrade, he said that there are many things before it. ETH 2.0 clients were successfully linked up a few weeks ago in the first of such interoperability tests as he said, adding the following:

“The next step is to make sure they can maintain a public network at scale. We’re talking about potentially hundreds of thousands of validators aggregating a huge number of transactions.”