The developers agreed to the new tentative date after their call number 73. It is estimated that the hard fork will occur at the height of block 9,056,000.

The main developers of Ethereum agreed on Friday, October 25th, that the delayed hard fork that will activate the Istanbul update on the main network would tentatively take place on December 4th of this year.

The programmers’ decision came during their call number 73 in which it was also established that, in case of any inconvenience for the activation of Istanbul, the process would be postponed again until January 8th.

During the event, which was attended by Hudson Jameson, Danno Ferrin, Péter Szilágyi, Piper Merriam, James Hancock, and Wei Tang, inter alia, it was emphasized that the dates are modifiable. This statement was highlighted due to the events that had occurred prior to the Constantinople and St. Petersburg hard fork, which was activated on the main network after three attempts.

Tim Beiko, another of the developers who attended the event, wrote on Twitter that there seemed to be a general agreement that December 4th is the date of the hard fork and January 8th is used as a backup date in case that something goes wrong.

After the call, Ferrin shared through the Gitter platform that, according to his calculations, the hard fork would occur at the height of block 9,056,000.

Network Enhancements

In August, Ethereum developers approved six changes for this first phase of the Istanbul hard fork that will include a reduction in data transmission costs for their transactions (EIP-2028) and the inclusion of a new algorithm for ETH mining (ProgPoW), all framed according to its plans to develop version 2.0 of the protocol. The one occurring in Istanbul will be the eighth hard fork that is executed on the Ethereum main network.

It should be remembered that at the end of September the Ethereum test network, Ropsten, forked into two separate chains after the update got two days ahead of time, taking developers by surprise. A similar situation occurred with the event of Constantinople.

The Istanbul test network delayed its activation from September 4th until October 2nd, since the programmers received more than 30 Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIP). Of that total, six improvements were accepted to form the first phase of the hard fork, whilst the rest would be part of a second phase that would be applied at some point between January and April 2020.

Ethereum is the network that includes Ether, the second most important cryptocurrency according to its market capitalization, only behind Bitcoin. At the time of writing this article, its price is USD 191.29, according to data from CoinMarketCap.

Expert cryptocurrency users and novices may consider the option of investing in Ether, and so they are expecting to see what happens after Ethereum’s Istanbul hard fork occurs. The same as has happened with Bitcoin; there are many opportunities for investors to make profits with Ether if a bullish trend occurs in the market before December 4th.

By Willmen Blanco

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