🎉 Istanbul hard fork

Ethereum has successfully completed the Istanbul hard fork. It brings six new Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) to life. We’re happy to say two of those were contributed to and developed by the Keep team. These EIPs help to improve the scalability of the Ethereum blockchain and were driven by a desire to improve interactions with private data on Ethereum:

EIP-152: Adds Blake2 compression function F precompile. This EIP will enable the BLAKE2b hash function and other higher-round 64-bit BLAKE2 variants to run cheaply on the EVM, allowing easier interoperability between Ethereum and Zcash as well as other Equihash-based PoW coins,

EIP-1108: Reduce alt_bn128 precompile gas costs because elliptic curve arithmetic precompiles are currently overpriced. Re-pricing the precompiles will greatly assist a number of privacy and scaling solutions on Ethereum.

One of the most prohibitive aspects with respect to privacy on Ethereum is the high cost of certain encryption operations, and both EIPs took direct aim at reducing this cost. With these changes, Ethereum will unlock new possibilities around random beacons, private token transfers, private computations, and cross-chain interoperability with Zcash, the foremost privacy-protecting digital currency.

— Antonio Salazar Cardozo, Keep Engineering Lead

Read more about those EIPs in our blog.