Ethereum Targets Dec. 4 for Istanbul Mainnet Activation

Ethereum's next system-wide upgrade, Istanbul, is scheduled to arrive on mainnet the week of Dec. 4.

Later on Friday, Danno Ferrin, blockchain protocol engineer at ethereum venture studio ConsenSys, proposed activating Istanbul at block number 9,056,000 in accordance with the targeted date of Dec. 4.

"From when I calculated at 14-second block times its 245,544.5 blocks, which puts noon UTC at block 9,055,928.5. So I would propose 9,056,000 as the Istanbul mainnet block target. Please check my math," Ferrin wrote after the meeting in an ethereum core developers chat room.

During the last system-wide upgrade, Constantinople, ethereum developers did indeed need to delay mainnet activation of the upgrade for a month due to a critical code vulnerability discovered just 48 hours before Constantinople's scheduled roll-out.

The most controversial among them, known as Ethereum Improvement Proposal 1884, will increase the computational costs of recalling data about the ethereum blockchain for application developers.

Last month, Istanbul was activated on ethereum test network Ropsten.

To prevent further confusion over which version of ethereum software to run for miners, ethereum core developers approved today a new code change called EIP 2124.

Originally proposed in May by ethereum core developers Péter Szilágyi and Felix Lange, EIP 2124 introduces a mechanism for users to easily identify what version of software a computer server, also called a node, in the ethereum network is running.

Called the "Fork identifier," Szilágyi explained on the call that EIP 2124 is a "Tiny and beyond trivial change." It can be rolled out by any ethereum software client without the need for coordination with other actors.

Outside of this, James Hancock, project lead at ethereum startup ETHSignals who most notably tried to initiate a fork of the ethereum blockchain in June, announced that he was joining the Ethereum Foundation to help coordinate ethereum system-wide upgrades, also called hard forks.