Everything You Need to Know About The Istanbul Hard Fork

Ethereum’s next network upgrade and what’s to come.

The day is almost nigh, Ethereum’s 8th network upgrade is upon us.

The 8th Ethereum hard fork is set to happen on December 7th, 2019. For those who are not as familiar with the term hard fork, think of the process as a “network upgrade.” The exact date is subject to change due to variable block times and timezones. You can watch the Istanbul Hard Fork Countdown Clock on EtherNodes.

Istanbul is one of the many hard forks that will take place on the road to Serenity, Ethereum’s transition from its current proof of work consensus mechanism towards proof of stake consensus. The current predicted block number for the transition is: Block Number: #9069000

The current estimated fork date and time at the time of this article is: Input from countdown

Istanbul Upgrades

Istanbul brings upgrades that will increase the costs of opcodes — which are currently cheap — to match their intensive computation costs. This will prevent spamming blocks and improve overall denial-of-service attack resilience. This upgrade will enable greater Ethereum and Zcash interoperability as well as with other Equihash-based proof of work cryptocurrencies. There will be various changes to opcodes (operation codes), which will also increase scalability performance for solutions based on zero-knowledge privacy technology like SNARKs and STARKs.

Read more about the Istanbul hard fork at the official ConsenSys Blog.

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