Ethereum developers rescheduled Istanbul hard fork date

The deployment of the Istanbul update, which is part of the Metropolis version, was delayed due to the developers of Parity – an Ethereum alternative client – who do not have time to implement all EIP.

As reported
Trustnodes, it was previously planned that Istanbul hard fork will be held on October 4, but now the update is likely to be postponed to November. The block number for starting the update in the test network should have been selected on August 23. However, at a developer meeting, Wei Tang from Parity Tech said his team needed more time to implement all of the EIPs. He said:

“We need time until September 6th to complete the implementation. This happened not only because we accepted EIP late, but also because we are now busy with large-scale processing of the code structure and want to finish it before we implement all EIP for Istanbul. ”

Now, the timing of the update deployment depends on how quickly Parity cope with the tasks. Geth client developers said they have already implemented all EIP in their code. Approximately 76% of the network currently uses Geth, and only 21% of users prefer Parity. To date, Parity has completed the implementation of only one EIP.

A little more than a week ago, the Ethereum developers finally approved
six EIP for Istanbul hard fork. The first part of Istanbul will be the eighth hard fork of the Ethereum blockchain and the third major update as part of the Metropolis version (1.3). The second part of Istanbul will be the last hard fork before moving to Ethereum 2.0.