The Ethereum Foundation ecosystem and its founder Vitalik Buterin have long announced work on its global update, known as Metropolis. This update involves many changes (Ethereum Sharding, Lightining network, Plasma, State Channel), among them two subsequent hardforks — Byzantium and Constantinople.

Today’s Geth update is one step towards this. The Geth client now supports software that is being used in the test blockchain that is being used prior to the launch of Byzantium. This blockchain will be launched starting September 18th on an Ethereum test network named Ropsten.

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Aside from Byzantium compatibility, the software has been updated with multiple performance upgrades. These include steps towards decreasing the volume of data required by the node from 26,3 GB to 14,9 GB. The new nodes will also be able to process contracts faster, decreasing filtration time from minutes to seconds.

Some of the updates are not yet complete, but are promised to decrease the demands towards base single rank protocol bandwidth from 33,6 to 13,5 GB.

The software package also includes an enhanced transaction pool. An earlier version of Geth distributed high-paying transactions were prioritized indiscriminately, but in the new version a Geth user’s transaction will always be prioritized regardless of transaction payment.

New security measures involve creation of a reserve copy on the transaction disk for local transactions in the event of a node failing. Furthermore, Geth will now have support for the Trezor line of wallets.

The goal of Ethereum Foundation is to increase network bandwidth. Currently at its peak it is able to process 5 to 15 transactions per second, but this number has to increase a hundredfold in order to compete with modern payment systems. Changes of blockchain address this. The more transactions Ether can support within a single unit of time, the better it is for everyone.

This includes all BANKEX projects, as the power of Ethereum blockchain will increase. This means our clients (users of the Proof-of-Asset protocol) will experience less issues, increasing their potential capabilities.

On the other hand, scaling will also attract a number of new users to Ether. If the Ethereum team is successful, cryptocurrency will most likely increase in price. It’s unclear how the price of transactions (gas) is going to be affected by popularization. It is possible that end user expenditures will increase proportionally.

Byzantium EIPs

EIP 98 — Removal of intermediate state roots from receipts. Allows for parallel transaction processing.

EIP 658 — Embedding transaction return data in receipts. Allows light clients to verify correct execution of calls. Previously this could only be verified by a full-node.

EIP 100 — Change difficulty adjustment to target mean block time including uncles. Fixes block rewards for uncle blocks.

EIPs 198, 212 (197), 213 (196) — Precompiled contracts for modular exponentiation; elliptic curve addition, scalar multiplication and pairing. New cryptographic primitives enable ZK-Snarks. This will enhance privacy, security and scalability.

EIP 214 — Expanding the EVM with static contract calls. Fixes the problem that caused The DAO. Creates a safer, more defined way to call external EDCCs from within your EDCC.

EIP 211 — Expanding the EVM with dynamically sized data. Introduces two new opcodes: RETURNDATASIZE and RETURNDATACOPY. Enables forwarding EDCCs to return precisely what an underlying call returned. This step automates the hardcoding of how much memory is read from a call.

EIP 206 — Expanding the EVM with cheap state reverts. Gas expenditure update. By utilizing a revert instead of a throw, only the gas actually used is spent on a particular users transaction.

EIP 649 — Delaying the difficulty bomb and reducing the block reward. This delays Ice-Age by 18 months and reduces block rewards to three Ether. This is an effort to help ween the ecosystem off of proof-of-work.

EIP 684 — Preventing overwriting contracts. Byzantium is going to change the way EDCC addresses are created and this EIP makes sure no two EDCCs can occupy the same place on Ethereum.