Ethereum is expected to undergo an upgrade in early October, moving towards Istanbul.

Ethereum is reported to undergo the Istanbul hard fork in early October. This hard fork is scheduled for an upgrade.

Ethereum laid out its four stages of development from the beginning, which are Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, and the final stage Serenity, where the transition from the original PoW consensus mechanism to PoS mechanism takes place.

The last upgrade was the Constantinople hard fork in January 2019, aimed at making the Ethereum network lighter, faster, and more secure, with five main EIPs implemented, primarily in preparation for the fourth stage, serving as the beginning of ETH 2.0.

Hudson Jameson, Ethereum Foundation community manager, mentioned last week at an Ethereum core developers' meeting:

For those who are unaware of this upgrade, we estimate the date to be around October 2nd, based on the current block production pace, this could be a day or two earlier or later than that date.

Due to the large number of Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) submitted for review, the activation of the test network has been postponed to October 2nd.

Among approximately 30 EIPs under developer review, only 6 have been accepted for the upcoming Istanbul hard fork, with the other 8 EIPs temporarily planned for a system-wide upgrade, now known as "Berlin."

As the Istanbul test network upgrade is ahead of schedule by about a month, the mainnet activation will also be delayed to November after the Ethereum Foundation's prominent developers' conference Devcon concludes.

Devcon, an annual gathering organized by the Ethereum Foundation, aims to explore new frontiers in the Ethereum space, covering everything from deep technical to profound human content, including developers, designers, researchers, client implementers, testing engineers, infrastructure operators, community organizers, socio-economists, and artists, among others.

Security Audit

Aside from the ongoing debates surrounding certain EIPs approved for Istanbul, developers discussed the preliminary security audit results conducted by security consultancy firm Least Authority on the proposed ProgPoW Progressive Proof-of-Work mining algorithm change.

After nearly a year of discussion among developers, ProgPoW became one of the EIPs aimed at preventing specialized mining hardware called ASICs from participating in the network and limiting the production output of certain miners, estimated at $655 million annually.

The CEO of Least Authority summarized during the meeting:

At a high level, ProgPoW meets its design goals. Its expected economic effects are reasonable, with no major issues. That being said, we did find a potential threat... and made some recommendations on things that could be done to better ensure ProgPoW works as expected in the future.

Unless the auditors raise any major security concerns, developers will proceed with activating the mining code change in support of this fork.

Further Reading

• Bitcoin still has 31 more halving events to come
• The Marshall Islands are accelerating the development of their "national cryptocurrency"

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