Istanbul hard fork takes place on Ethereum blockchain

At 3:25 on December 8, the Istanbul hard fork was successfully activated on the Ethereum network. The update was deployed at block 9,069000. This system-wide update was the third for the network this year.

Earlier in 2019, the network had hard forksSt. Petersburg and Constantinople. Another iteration of Ethereum 1.x - Istanbul became the eighth hard fork of the network as a whole. The second part of Istanbul was the last planned hard fork before moving to Ethereum 2.0. Ethereum developers approved six EIPs for updates this August, including EIP 152, 1108, 1344, 1844, 2028, and 2200.

According to a ConsenSys blog post, six EIPs solve the following problems:

Resistance to DDoS attacks (EIP 1344);

Functional compatibility with cryptocurrencies based on Equihash hashing algorithm, for example, Zcash (EIP 152);

The cost of gas (EIP 1108, 2028, 2200). The reduction in gas costs is aimed at increasing the throughput of the blockchain and developing proof technologies with zero disclosure, for example, zk-SNARK.

Three days before the hard fork, the Ethereum client teamParity asked users to upgrade to the latest client version, which includes EIP 1344, not previously added to previous Parity releases. In the summer, Istanbul was already postponed due to the fact that the Parity team did not manage to implement all EIP. Ethereum developer Hudson Jameson said on Friday:

“Parity is used by approximately 23% of usersnetworks and usually he is preferred by large miners and exchanges. I’m afraid that if one or two large exchanges remain on the previous version of the protocol, and a couple of large pools continue to mine blocks in the old chain, this will cause confusion, and in more serious cases will lead to the problem of double spending. ”

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