Ethereum’s Istanbul Hard Fork Phase One is on December 7th

Just a reminder that on December 7th, at block number 9069000, Ethereum (ETH) will execute the first phase of its Istanbul hard fork (a little more than 19000 blocks as of writing this). Earlier the hard fork was scheduled to happen today on 4th of December at block 9056000, but the date has been pushed back a bit. The second phase of the hard fork is scheduled for early 2020, though no exact date has been announced yet. The first phase of the Istanbul hard fork is not going to be changing anything related to the PoW mining algorithm hat the project uses at the moment, after the fork Ethereum will still be mined using the Ethash algorithm. The second phase for early next year though will bring a change in the mining algorithm from Ethash to the ProgPow algorithm, rendering the current Ethash ASIC miners useless for Ethereum mining (there are other Ethash cryptos out there though). To see the list of EIPs included in the fork (Ethereum Improvement Proposals). Make sure you upgrade your Ethereum local node if you are running one before the fork occurs in order to avoid possible problems.

– To check the time left before Ethereum (ETH) hard forks next at block 9069000…