With New Year’s Day approaching, the Ethereum company wants to celebrate twice, after the announcement of the “anticipated Istanbul” update.

The Ethereum blockchain, which is behind the second largest cryptocurrency by total market capitalization, will see a new update known as the “Istanbul Fork” which is one of the few important network upgrades.

According to Etherscan, an Ethereum-centric data and information platform, Istanbul will be active in block 9069000, which is expected to happen today.

What is the “Istanbul” update for the Ethereum blockchain?

At the time of writing this post, the “Istanbul” update will be activated.

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The new upgrade will implement six Ethereum Improvement Suggestions, or EIPs.

The EIPs selected were from a pool of more than 30 proposals.

Here is a list of the “EIPs” and a brief summary of what each one of them does, according to Source:

• EIP 1679: For this proposal it will carry only the protocol changes that will be included in Istanbul.
• EIP-2200: This proposal will introduce how to calculate the cost of storing data in an Ethereum virtual machine, and give smart contracts the ability to implement more functions.
• EIP-1884: This EIP will change the transaction cost of some EVM code to prevent spam attacks and to better balance the amount of computation in each block.
• EIP-2028: This proposal will allow for the least expensive zero-knowledge “SNARK” and “STARK” technology in the Ethereum blockchain, reducing the cost of “calling data within the output.”
• EIP-1344: This “EIP” will add a way for contracts to keep track of the Ethereum chain they are in.
• EIP-1108: This will make EIP less expensive to know (SNARKs), allowing for cheaper scaling and privacy techniques.
• EIP-152: This proposal adds the ability to verify Equihash PoW within the Ethereum nodes, which will enable relays and atomic exchanges between Zcash and Ethereum.

Readiness and readiness:

While the Istanbul update is fast approaching, it appears that not all node-runners in the network are ready for the upgrade.

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According to Ethernodes.org, only 48% of the nodes running Geth are ready to adopt Istanbul, and 40% of those Parity devices are ready to be upgraded.

Due to the lack of nodes running the updated software as the crossroads approached, the Ethereum community called on node operators to update their clients to avoid compatibility issues.

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An excerpt from a blog post from the Ethereum Foundation reads:

If you are using Ethereum clients and have not updated to the latest version (mentioned above), the network will sync the pre-fork blockchain as soon as the upgrade occurs.

You will be stuck in an incompatible chain that follows the old rules and will not be able to send Ethereum or work on the network after the upgrade.

It should be noted that there may be no consensus issues when Istanbul is active,

As long as all Ethereum trading platforms, DeFi operators, miners and other network maintainers upgrade their contract before Istanbul is activated.

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