Last Saturday was expected the hard fork of ethereum, the first of a series of steps that will lead the currency created by Vitalik Buterin from the POW consensus protocol currently used by the network to a new POS protocol that has been talked about for years; the purpose of this operation, of course, is to increase the scalability of the network and, at least it is said around, to avoid the risk of centralization of computing power that characterizes the POW networks. Unfortunately, as those who habitually follow us know very well, even the POS consent protocols are subject to mining centralization, in this kind of systems, in fact, the richest stakeholders are also those that manage the most influential nodes of the network, on the other hand actually a POS protocol is more scalable and more sustainable in terms of energy consumption. Not only that, the transition (which will take place in the future) to a POS consent protocol by ethereum will render all the hardware currently used by the miners substantially useless, which means that it will probably start to rain on the market used GPUs at bargain prices, favoring on the one hand the collapse of demand and on the other the surge in supply, with consequent collapse in the prices of graphic cards; those who had, in a short-sighted manner, purchased an ASIC to undermine ethereum recently risk ending up at a loss and failing to return costs because these devices are destined to become substantially useless.

Having said that we return to our hard fork, Istanbul, as mentioned, had a wide and widespread support from all the nodes of the network and the operations are spun as smooth as oil, which however is never so obvious when we talk to perform such an update. Extensive support also from the exchange, with various exchanges of cryptocurrencies, for example we mention binances, which have decided to update themselves a few days ahead of the scheduled date; if, therefore, Binance had already announced support for the update on December 5, Coinbase has already provided, yesterday, to confirm that the deposits and withdrawals of Ethereum and ERC20 are operational again after being suspended for the update of the node. The same is also true for the main trading platforms at a global level with Bitfinex, Kraken and Poloniex, all of which have successfully completed the update requested by the network. In short, we can say that Istanbul has seen widespread adoption by the community and that there have been no significant reports of problems of any kind; the first step of the transition to the POS protocol has been successfully completed, the situation will continue to evolve in the coming months and we will see if with this change ethereum will be able to recover some of that centrality that it seemed to have lost.