Ethereum's long-anticipated hard fork, Istanbul, finally completed

Ethereum has finally completed its eight hard fork known as Istanbul. The hard fork came a bit after its scheduled time, but it arrived nonetheless, taking place early on December 8th. However, many of the nodes were seemingly not ready for the upgrade, so 79 of them remained without the upgrade even now, on December 9th. However, various Ethereum-supporting crypto exchanges were prepared, and they experienced a short period of maintenance, as they implemented changes for Ether and ERC-20 tokens wallets.

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Unforeseen consequences emerge

Unfortunately, those who may have expected ETH price to surge due to the newest upgrade still remain disappointed at the time of writing. Ethereum’s current price sits at $149.46, after dropping by 0.18% in the last 24 hours. Another unforeseen consequence is the Aragon project’s incompatibility with the Istanbul hard fork. More precisely, the project was unable to sync with some of the EIP that were a part of it, so a call for special actions was made in order to limit the negative consequences. The consequences will still be rather significant, as most, if not all, Aragon-based projects might have to move their tokens to the updated version. Another incident regarding the update came only days before the fork was implemented when Parity allegedly forgot to properly prepare its nodes for the upgrade. The nodes were not ready as some EIPs were missing, which could have caused the splitting of the chain. As mentioned, Istanbul is Ethereum’s eight upgrades, but it is far from being the last. More forks will arrive in the future, as the network is detecting more and more issues as the number of its projects continues to grow. For now, the network managed to maintain stability, although the hashrate has dropped by approximately 26,000 GH/s, from 196,000 GH/s to 170,000 GH/s.