Most Ethereum nodes are still not ready for Istanbul hard fork

According to the Ethernodes service, there are less than 17 hours left until Istanbul activation, but the majority of Parity and Geth clients are still notready for this major update.

At the time of writing, 48% of Geth clients and 43% of Parity have been updated. The total willingness of network participants is 46.7%

On December 6, the Ethereum Foundation strongly recommended that users update the Parity nodes, for which a new version of the software was urgently released.

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The developers themselves note that Parity Ethereum v2.5.11-stable and Parity Ethereum v2.6.6-beta include an emergency patch that adds the missing eip1344_transition function to the main network.

“Users are encouraged to upgrade as soon as possible to prevent problems during the inevitable Istanbul hard fork.”, - stressed in Parity.

Recall, the planned Ethereum hard fork called Istanbul will take place at block # 9069000.

It will be the eighth major update tonetworks of the second cryptocurrency capitalization and is expected to usher in the transition to ETH 2.0 - a new stage in the evolution of the project, which provides for the future migration to the Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm.

The upcoming upgrade, among other things, will provideEthereum’s compatibility with Zcash cryptocurrency will increase the scalability of solutions based on zero-disclosure proof technology (SNARKs and STARKs), as well as change the cost of gas of various operating codes (opcodes) in order to complicate block spam and increase the network's resistance to DoS attacks.