Ethereum Successfully Completed Istanbul Hard Fork

Another iteration of Ethereum 1.x, Istanbul, is the eighth hard fork of the network as a whole. The monthly preparation process was successfully completed at 00:25 UTC on Sunday, December 8th at block 9,069,000. The system-wide update is the third in the network in 2019, after the forks of St. Petersburg and Constantinople.

The first code changes were approved back in June 2019. All Ethereum customers who host and update the ethereum protocol themselves have agreed to new software. Istanbul includes six Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIP), specific code changes for the ethereum protocol, including EIP 152, 1108, 1344, 1844, 2028 and 2200.

As described in a blog post by 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).

Despite the improvements, hard fork has brought problems to a number of projects. As such, 680 smart contracts on the Aragon platform will be broken. Changes in the code will change the way funds are transferred between decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), forcing users to manually migrate smart contracts from one structure to another.