Ethereum’s Istanbul hardfork moves ahead with Geth’s new release

The Ethereum community is gearing up for a host of developments, with Ethereum 2.0 set to roll out at the beginning of 2020 and Istanbul hardfork just around the corner. The Istanbul hardfork is speculated to take place on 4 December 2019 at block number 9069000. The EIPs that would go live are,

• EIP 2200: Rebalance net-metered SSTORE gas cost
• EIP 1108: alt_bn128 precompile gas costs reduction
• EIP 152: Blake2 compression function F precompile
• EIP 1884: the trie-size-dependent opcodes
• EIP 1344: ChainID
• EIP 2028: Calldata gas cost reduction

The Istanbul hardfork testnets have been activated, among which, Görli Testnet was the latest one to be activated on 30 October. It was deemed to be successful, with Tim Beiko affirming it by tweeting,

“And we’re on! Staring with an Istanbul update, the block number is set to 9,069,000 (Dec 4th) and Goerli successfully upgraded.”

Further, Rinkeby Testnet is scheduled to be activated on 13 November. In another recent development, the team lead at Ethereum, Péter Szilágyi, revealed that Geth v1.9.7 [Quad Kicker] was out. This release further “initializes” the Istanbul fork at block number 9069000. Apart from developing codes for Istanbul, developers have launched several updates, which include enforcing proper fork orders, integrating Istanbul configuration support for private networks, and speeding certain opcodes by avoiding memory copying in the EVM.

Szilágyi tweeted about the same and said,

“Geth v1.9.7 (Quad Kicker) out, enabling the Istanbul hardfork for #Ethereum mainnet (block 9069000, targeted for the 4th of December). Among others we’ve shipped eth/64, a faster EVM, #golang 1.13.4 on all PPAs and almost done with DNS discovery!”

This aside, it was also noted that the total value locked [USD] in DeFi surged past $650 million for the first time since July. On 7 November, the total value locked in DeFi was $660.48 million. The previous all-time high for the value locked in DeFi was $684 million, back in June.

Source – DeFi Pulse

However, at the time of writing, the total value locked had depreciated to $648.2 million. Ethereum’s Maker platform was seen dominating more than half of the platform as it registered a dominance of 52.78%. Other platforms like Compound, Synthetix, and InstaDApp followed Maker, as they locked high values as well.

Additionally, the Ethereum network achieved another milestone as Ether-backed stablecoin, DAI, stabilized by Ethereum’s smart contract platform, Maker, recently hit an all-time high of 100 million in terms of its total supply. Several members of the community commented on the latest development as well.

Reddit user, Texugo_do_mel, said,

“This is one of the most prominent projects in the space nowadays. There is no stable coin that has a really logical approach. Dai seems to be the only one.”