Hardfork Istanbul was launched late Saturday night in a “seamless” mode – without disconnecting the network. Crypto exchanges have already backed it.
According to Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, hardfork Istanbul will increase network performance to 3K TPS. Ethereum is currently performing 15 transactions per second. Istanbul followed Constantinople, which was launched in February. Buterin suggested not to consider it as hard fork, but as an upgrade. However, after Constantinople, ETH more than doubled by June 2019, to the level of $ 360. But then it collapsed almost to its previous value, together with the market and taking into account the upcoming hardfork.
Ethereum this year does not repeat the graph of Bitcoin as accurately as it did before. Bitcoin, with all its volatility, has more than doubled since the beginning of the year. Ether added only 13%.
Despite the fact that most exchanges enthusiastically supported Istanbul, the number of transactions on the network after a hard fork turned out to be low, only 440K per day. At the peak of the market in January 2018, it was 1.15 M TPS a day.
Istanbul is the last hard fork before the launch of Ethereum 2.0, which is scheduled for the second quarter of 2020. Zero phase of Ethereum 2.0 can be launched already in early January, testing had begun a couple of days ago. The key feature of Ethereum 2.0 is transition to the Proof-of-Stake consensus, when the operation of the blockchain will not depend on mining.
