Monday in the test network Ethereum Ropsten has a system-wide update. And while Istambul should ultimately improve network efficiency, the testnet launch will not be smooth for everyone.
Specifically, for the Aragon control platform, the code changes were supposed to break approximately 680 smart contracts, said Jorge Izquierdo, CTO of Aragon One. These smart contracts usually govern the management of decentralized applications (dapps) running on the ethereum blockchain.
Iskierdo reports that this means that forced updates are required for the involved smart contracts to ensure the smooth operation of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) built on the Aragon platform.
“Until now, DAOs could receive ETH from each other,” Izquierdo said. “This will not be possible after the Istambul hard fork.”
Aragon One, public relations lead John Light, says these transfers between DAOs in Aragon will actually be "over."
Calling this an unsuccessful “compromise” from Aragon’s point of view, Iskierdo said:
“This problem should not have been considered so important that this hard fork did not happen, which, from our point of view, is regrettable [but] that we understand that this is a tough balance.”)
Indeed, for the Ethereum Kyber Network token exchange platform, a system-wide update affects only one smart contract, according to Kyber Network co-founder Loi Luu.
Returning to this, a code change in Istambul that affects some smart contracts is known as “ Ethereum Improvement Proposal ”(EIP) 1884 and aims to eliminate one of the parties to the sustainable growth of Ethereum.
As the size of the blockchain increased, the computational cost of calling network state data (such as account balances) also increased. On the other hand, gas prices remained stagnant, creating what, in the words of Martin Holst Svende, head of security for the Ethereum Foundation, "an imbalance between the cost of an operation and resource consumption."
To reduce the chance of network congestion, EIP 1884 raises gas prices for three resource-intensive operations.
Load down
The so-called SLOAD operation will face the highest cost increase for Ethereum-based application developers, from 200 gas per operation to 800 gas per operation.
This fourfold increase in the cost of gas SLOAD violates the smart contracts of Aragon and increases prices for end users of the Kyber network.
“In a single Kyber transaction, we actually use many SLOAD operations,” Luu said. “So after [Istanbul] goes into effect, the price of most of our deals will increase by 30 percent.”
Although this is not the first time gas prices have been raised for the SLOAD operation, Luu says the previous increase from 50 to 200 gases in 2016 year occurred when there were fewer active ethereum network users and when ETH had a lower market value.
Now, says Luu, increasing the cost of SLOAD operations will have big consequences for both end users and application developers.
“[Istanbul] is a kind of hard fork that breaks a lot of smart contracts,” Luu said earlier this month. "If we didn't follow the conversations between the core developers, we would have missed [EIP 1884 information] and that would have been very bad for us."
However, blockchain researcher Mikhail Belych said on Monday that the “bad practice of the developers” is most likely the cause of such cases, and not the modernization itself, adding:
“Developers definitely should not hard code the assumptions about the cost of gas in their applications, because these numbers can change at any time.”