Ethereum Istanbul Hard Fork Delayed For October

The testnet activation of the Ethereum Istanbul hard fork has been officially delayed for early October, the latest cryptocurrency news show. As the community manager of the Ethereum Foundation named Hudson Jameson said, the hard fork is delayed due to a couple of reasons.

First, Jameson noted on a developers’ call that the testnet launch of the hard fork is now scheduled to take place at the start of October. As he added:

“For anyone listening in who doesn’t know how this works, we pick a block number that we estimate to be around the 2nd of October. […] However, that might be one or two days behind or forward from that date based on how fast blocks are produced between now and then.”

For those of you who haven’t been following our altcoin news, the Ethereum Istanbul hard fork has been seen as a major upgrade to the ETH network. Many sites previously reported on August 28 that Parity, which is a blockchain infrastructure company that runs the core of the Ethereum network, had already delayed the planned hard fork until September 6.

The Parity core developer Wei Tang, at the time noted that the organization needed at least two more weeks before the devs could proceed in selecting a block number for the Ethereum Istanbul hard fork.

“We need time till 6th September to finish the implementation. Not only because we accepted EIPs late but right now we just happened to be a large code base refactoring and we probably want to merge them first before merging Istanbul EIP,” he noted.

The Ethereum co-founder was also in the coming altcoin news. Vitalik Buterin recently noted that the Ethereum blockchain is nearly full, which seems to deter a new adoption by the potential Ethereum contributors.

“Scalability is a big bottleneck because the Ethereum blockchain is almost full. If you’re a bigger organization, the calculus is that if we join, it will not only be more full but we will be competing with everyone for transaction space. It’s already expensive and it will be even five times more expensive because of us. There is pressure to keeping people from joining,” Buterin added.