What changes should you expect with the current upgrade in a move towards an eventual PoS blockchain
The widely anticipated Istanbul hard fork finally went live on Ethereum’s network at block number 9,069,000. This marks the implementation of one of the major iterations in Ethereum 1.x upgrades. Istanbul's main net is the third system-wide upgrade in 2019 after the St. Petersburg & Constantinople hard forks earlier in February of this year and eighth overall (infographic below).
Although there was a cushion period of one month kept for the upgrade, in case there were any technical issues that might surface, the event went relatively smoothly. The pioneer smart contracts dApp platform has undergone several hard forks since its launch in July 2015 to improve different features of the network.
These consistent improvements by a dedicated team of developers over the past few years have enabled Ethereum to keep its position as the leader in smart contract technology & DApp development — the blockchain is still home to 85% of all decentralized applications.
The Ethereum venture studio ConsenSys describes the six Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) expected to be implemented with the Istanbul upgrade. EIPs are suggested improvements to the network that are debated & discussed among the Ethereum community before being implemented. In this case, 6 of the original 11 proposed EIPs were selected for Istanbul upgrade implementation — EIP-152, EIP-1108, EIP-1344, EIP-1844, EIP-2028, EIP-2200.
While the EIPs would make much more sense to the tech-savvy readership, here is what’s changing from a layman’s perspective:
- Improving scalability — Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum claims the upgraded version of the network should be able to process up to 3,000 TPS (transactions per second).
- A change in the cost of various operation codes (opcodes) would prevent spamming of the network’s blocks and increase resilience against a denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.
- Greater interoperability between Ethereum and Zcash — enabling trustless atomic swaps between these chains, reducing human errors while making it cheaper to use zero-knowledge technologies like zk-SNARKs.
- Reducing gas costs — this will reduce the cost of transactions on the Ethereum network. The transaction cost on the network is called gas which is paid in ETH fractions called gwei.
- Most of the top cryptocurrency exchanges, including Binance, Poloniex, Kraken, Coinbase among others have announced support for the Istanbul hard fork — users holding Ethereum or ERC20 token on these platforms don’t need to take any action.
- Users holding tokens in mobile wallets like MetaMask & Coinbase Wallet or others who hold hardware wallets like Ledger or Trezor don’t have to do anything. However, if any of your wallet services inform you take additional actions, make sure to follow the instructions.
- And finally, Ethereum node runners who have failed to upgrade their software to the fork-ready Ethereum client version, need to resynchronize their node with the Ethereum blockchain, which could take hours or even days. Infura is the only fork-ready exception in this regard.
Looking ahead, there are other scheduled Ethereum hard forks after Istanbul as part of the Ethereum 1.x upgrades. The roadmap to Serenity (Ethereum 2.0) needs these comprehensive set to upgrades to be implemented for adoption in the short term.
The first phase of Serenity will see the roll-out of Beacon Chain — a PoS blockchain that would run alongside the original Ethereum PoW chain, ensuring a continuity of the chains, before the final transition to the PoS network. Ethereum 2.0 or the network’s final move towards Proof of Stake (PoS) protocol is expected to be fully implemented and operational by 2021.
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