The Istanbul Hard Fork release date, which has been delayed at least three times, has been set for December 4, 2019. As a reminder, the last update in Constantinople was delayed 48 hours before the announcement of its release. Therefore, the global Ethereum community is waiting with bated breath for any information about the upcoming system-wide update.
Hard fork hard-coded
Peter Siladzhi, developer of the Ethereum kernel and the “branch identifier”, recently shared release information Geth v1.9.7. Written in Go, this will be the most common implementation in Ethereum Mainnet. This is the first version of Geth, which will initialize the Ethereum Mainnet hard fork at block 9069000, which is scheduled to arrive on December 4, 2019.
It is important that Ethereum Network members upgrade their Mainnet Geth nodes to v1.9.7 to avoid any surprises along the way.
In addition to initializing the Hard Fork, the new release contains several major fixes and updates. Specifically, this release introduces new branching orders to avoid partially provisioned private networks and to stop copying unnecessary memory in the Ethereum VM. Also fixed several minor bugs when executing transactions.
The long-awaited update
The story of the Ethereum Mainnet Istanbul began in May 2019, when Felix Lange and Peter Silaci presented an Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 2124. It offers a mechanism to allow users to determine what software based on the computer server nodes on the Ethereum network is running.
Ultimately, this escalated into a large-scale upgrade of the entire system, which mainly concerned data storage on the Ethereum network and mining algorithms. Such an upgrade will increase computational costs, but protect the system from potential denial of service (DoS) attacks.
Hard fork has already encountered serious unforeseen issues with the Ropsten Testnet. What do you think? Will adoption of Mainnet Istanbul be smooth?