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Ethereum Activated Istanbul Hard Fork Upgrade

In crypto news today, the Ethereum blockchain officially activated the Istanbul hard fork upgrade on December 8. A hard fork is a global change of a blockchain’s validation rules. Thus, following its activation, every network node must upgrade its software and start working per the new regulations. Also, nodes that further run outdated clients would see their blocks rejected by a network as invalid.

Aside from that, in other circumstances, a hard fork might result in the splitting of a blockchain. So, this may create two competing networks. For instance, Bitcoin Cash is a hard fork of Bitcoin, which split from the leading network. Then, in some cases, like with the Istanbul of Ethereum, a hard fork will become a tool to upgrade a blockchain.

They designed Istanbul to make sure the compatibility of Ethereum with privacy coin Zcash. Also, it boosts the scalability of zero-knowledge proof of technology-based solutions (SNARKs and STARKs). Then, it balances the cost of gas (fees paid for smart contracts implementation) for different operations. Lastly, improve the network’s resistance to denial of service (DoS) attacks.

In addition to that, the community in the form of Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) submitted and voted for the new upgrades. Following the successful activation, it implements six previously approved proposals on the blockchain.

 

Ethereum Clients

Before the Istanbul activation, several members of the community had concerns about the network’s overall readiness for the soon-to-come hard fork. Based on the Ethernodes data, more than 53% of Parity and Geth clients did not update their software less than 15 hours prior to the fork.

But the situation shifted drastically after that. During the time of writing, 96.7% of Ethereum clients have successfully updated and fully support Istanbul.

Moreover, a lot of the commenters congratulated Ethereum’s founder Vitalik Buterin and the core developers for the victorious launch. Moreover, some named Istanbul the birth of Ethereum 2.0 and prophesized it going ‘to the moon.’ Then, they expect a surge in cryptocurrency ETH price.

In an earlier report of Decrypt, a change to gas costs that took effect with the hard fork may cause some smart contract to fail. Looking at the comments on Twitter, the reaction of the community to Istanbul’s activation is mostly favorable. And several users even indicated that the reduced gas cost implemented in the fork has made verifying some smart contracts much cheaper.

Istanbul Hard Fork’s Support

After the successful Ethereum Istanbul hard fork update, several famous exchanges have announced their official support for it.

Previously, on December 7, the network showed ample collaboration between node operators and miners to update the software to support it. Then, some crypto exchanges even expressed their willingness to update a few days before the scheduled hard fork.

Notably, Binance announced its support for the upgrade on December 5. And the day after that, its U.S. subsidiary did the same thing. Coinbase also tweeted that Ethereum and ERC20 deposits and withdrawals have resumed on its trading platform. Then, the node upgrade became complete.



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