Ethereum hard fork successful! Ethereum hard fork Istanbul was successfully implemented after a months-long progress that concluded earlier today. The Ethereum hard fork took place at block number 9,069,000.
Istanbul follows Constantinople and St. Petersburg, and is the eighth hard fork overall. This fork, unlike other high stake forks like Bitcoin and Bitcoin cash, was not contentious. All ethereum clients, hosts, and independent operators, upgraded the ethereum protocol themselves.
Istanbul includes six Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), specific code changes to the ethereum protocol, including EIPs 152, 1108, 1344, 1844, 2028 and 2200.
According to a blog post from ethereum venture studio ConsenSys, the main issues addressed by the six EIPs are:
-Denial-of-service (DDoS) attack resilience (EIP 1344).
-Interoperability with equihash-based proof-of-work (PoW) cryptocurrencies such as zcash (EIP 152).
-Gas costs (EIPs 1108, 2028, 2200).
Ethereum uses gas to fund sending of transactions and the gas is paid in fractions of ETH called gwei. The lowered gas costs introduced by Istanbul’s EIPs are meant to increase bandwidth on the blockchain and foster zero-knowledge privacy tech such as zk-SNARKs.
One scare before Istanbul took place was with ethereum client Parity, which released an urgent message to Parity Ethereum users to conduct a patch on the pre-released Parity Ethereum update before the Istanbul hard fork occurred. In short, EIP 1344 – concerning opcodes – was not initially included.
While the fix itself was simple, ethereum core developer Hudson Jameson said in the “AllCoreDevs” Gitter messaging platform that if Parity clients failed to update in time, a new chain could develop causing double spends.
“Parity represents about 23% of the network and is commonly used by major miners and exchanges,” Jameson said Friday. “I fear if one to two major exchanges stay on the old fork and one to two major mining pools mine the old chain it will cause confusion and in a more severe case double spends.”
With the latest implementation of Istanbul, Ethereum is up 1% as of writing time. What do you think? Let us know on our Facebook page!
