Ethereum’s upcoming hard fork, Istanbul, will be taking its preliminary step with the Testnet upgrade in October 2019. The upgrade was supposed to go live this coming month, but was postponed to a later date due to a delay in clients upgrade. The block number and the date for the Mainnet upgrade are yet to finalized by developers.

Afri Schoedon, Relations Developer at Parity Tech, said on Twitter,

“Görli testnet will activate Istanbul protocol upgrade on block 1561651 (Oct 30) and proposes to upgrade Ropsten on block 6485846 (Oct 2).”

Further, in the core dev Gitter Channel, Hudson Jameson, Community Manager at Ethereum Foundation, proposed the block number 6485846, which would be around October 2 for Istanbul’s Ropsten Testnet upgrade, considering the average block time is at 17 seconds. The core developers are yet to come to a consensus on the Ropsten Testnet proposal. Jameson said,

“[…] [Afri] calculation, if we assume the block time on Ropsten will be around 17 seconds between now and then, the block number should be 6485846 to put us at Wednesday Oct. 2nd. if we assume the block time on Ropsten will be around 15 seconds between now and then the hard fork block number I calculated would be 6482846”

The Istanbul hard fork introduces six Ethereum Improvement Protocols [EIPs] and at press time, four out of five Ethereum clients had merged the EIPs. The proposed EIPs are,

EIP 152: Blake2 compression function F precompile

EIP 1108: alt_bn128 precompile gas costs reduction

EIP 1344: ChainID

EIP 1884: the trie-size-dependent opcodes

EIP 2028: Calldata gas cost reduction

EIP 2200: Rebalance net-metered SSTORE gas cost

In terms of client update, Aleth and Trinity are the only remaining clients that are yet to merge all the improvement protocols. Whereas Geth, Parity, Pantheon [Besu] and Nethermind have merged all the six EIPs, with Geth and Besu merging Genesis activation support and activation delay switch.



