An update of the Ethereum blockchain was released a few hours ago, thanks to which minor bugs have been fixed and some preliminary measures have been introduced in preparation for Istanbul, the next Ethereum hard fork scheduled for October 16th, 2019.
The update is available on the dedicated GitHub page. Here are some of the features:
- Rework client tracking for light servers to better prioritize requests, making it fairer for everyone (#19745).
- Avoid retrieving full blocks for GraphQL queries on light clients if the query relies on headers (#19886).
- Support closing a simulated backends, avoiding a goroutine leak during log running tests (#19902).
- Support eth_call overriding chain state before execution, see API docs for details (#19917).
- Replace all user facing passphrase labels with password to avoid confusion (#19932).
In addition, some EIPs (Ethereum Improvement Proposals) have been implemented:
- Implement EIP-1884: Repricing for trie-size-dependent opcodes (#19743);
- Implement EIP-1108: Reduce alt_bn128 precompile gas costs (#19904);
- Implement EIP-1344: ChainID opcode (#19921).
In conclusion, the Ethereum team explained that it will provide a date for the testnet where it will start testing everything for the introduction of the Istanbul hard fork which, unless there are complications, should be scheduled for October 16th, 2019: basically 2 months to test and launch the Istanbul fork in preparation for the future update that will lead to Ethereum 2.0.
