Altcoin News: Ethereum Developers Announces Postponement of Istanbul Update

August 28, 2019, by Marko Vidrih on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE

The planned update of the Ethereum main blockchain is postponed, Trustnodes writes.

Parity Tech developer Wei Tang said: “We need time till 6th September to finish the implementation. Not only because we accepted EIPs late but right now we just happened to be a large code base refactoring and we probably want to merge them first before merging Istanbul EIP.”

It was assumed that the block number for starting the update in the test network should have been selected on Friday, August 23. Now, however, developers will have to wait for Parity to complete the necessary improvements on its part. According to Tang, it will take 2 weeks.

The main network update was to take place on October 4, before the Devcon conference. Under current conditions, it may be delayed until November, depending on how quickly Parity cope with the task.

However, the Geth client, curated by the Ethereum Foundation, has implemented all the necessary Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIP). Currently, about 76% of nodes in the Ethereum network use the Geth client and 21% use the Parity client.

In addition, developers are discussing the issue of increasing gas consumption for certain actions or functions, since changing the settings can lead to the failure of some smart contracts that use fixed gas values ​​in certain scenarios.

Ethereum Foundation developer Martin Holst Swende said: “We know it’s going to break things, theoretically. All of those things can break a different way.” “What I really worry is that this could be a potential PR disaster. So the issue is basically, if we broke some contracts and we are asked to unfreeze it, it could have a similar situation like the Parity Multisig,” Tang added.

In 2017, a bug in the smart contract code led to the freezing of 500,000 ETH on Parity wallets. In this case, the problem may arise not at the level of a separate smart contract, but at the level of the entire Ethereum protocol, if the bugs that the developers are afraid of really show themselves.

In particular, such bugs can be used to carry out attacks by filling blocks with operations with too low commissions, which will lead to an increase in the processing time of blocks.

The release of the Ethereum 2.0 genesis block is scheduled for January 2020, however, the transfer of Istanbul to November or, possibly, later will not affect the second network, as different teams work on these initiatives, and Ethereum 2.0 will become an independent blockchain, which so far will not be connected to a valid PoW chain, Trustnodes notes.

Author: Marko Vidrih