Ethereum Istanbul Upgrade Announcement
A scheduled upgrade at block number 9,069,000 which is predicted to occur on Saturday, December 7, 2019
Istanbul brings upgrades that will:
- Align the costs of opcodes with their computational costs and improve denial-of-service attack resilience
- Make layer 2 solutions based on SNARKs and STARKs more performance.
- Enable Ethereum and Zcash to interoperate
- Allow contracts to introduce more creative functions.
Specifically:
EIP-152 Adds the ability to verify the Equihash PoW within an ethereum contract. This will enable a relay and atomic-swap transactions between Zcash.
EIP-1108 Makes zk-SNARKs cheaper, allowing for cheaper scaling and privacy applications to be built. See Matter labs, Aztec, Rollup and Zether for examples.
EIP-1344 Adds a way for contracts to track the correct chain (new opcode CHAINID at 0x46). To be used by contracts, especially those used by layer 2 (state channels, plasma), to follow the correct layer 1 chain, especially during a hard fork.
EIP-1884 Changes the cost of some EVM opcodes to prevent spamming attacks and to balance blocks better. The amount that must be paid for each operation in ethereum usually matches the computation required for that operation. This change increases some costs of some opcodes that are computationally intensive but currently cheap.
EIP-2028 Makes zk-SNARKs and zk-STARKs cheaper by reducing the cost of calling data within transactions. This will make layer 2 solutions able to increase throughput.
EIP-2200 Changes the calculation of cost of storage in the EVM and will enable contracts to introduce new functions including re-entry locks and same-contract multi-send.
Post-Istanbul:
The next fork will be called Berlin and will primarily be composed of the EIPs that did not make it into Istanbul (those in the ‘tentatively accepted’ category).
New Update: ethereum.org
The Ethereum network will be undergoing a scheduled upgrade at block number 9,069,000 which is predicted to occur on Saturday, December 7, 2019. The exact date is subject to change due to variable block times and timezones.
More detail:
