Ethereum Istanbul Gorli Testnet upgrade all set for 30 October

Latest reports reveal that the Ethereum Istanbul Gorli testnet upgrade is going to go live on 30th October 2019.

This upgrade was originally scheduled to go live in September but due to clients upgrade the event had to delay. The final date for Mainnet and the block number are not finalized by the developers yet.

Parity Tech’s Relations Developer Afri Schoedon tweeting about it stated that Ethereum Istanbul Gorli testnet upgrade would activate protocol upgraded on the block 1561651 on 30th October and proposed to upgrade the Ropsten on the block 6485846 on 2nd October.

https://twitter.com/a4fri/status/1173939316101386240

Moreover, the core developers Hudson Jameson, Gitter Channel, the Community Manager at the Ethereum Foundation proposed the block number 648546. This would be on 2nd October for the Ropsten Testnet upgrade of Istanbul, keeping in mind the average block time is seventeen seconds. The core dev team still has to decide about the Ropsten Testnet proposal.

What to expect from Ethereum Instanbul Gorli tesnet upgrade?

Istanbul’s hard fork introduced 6 Ethereum Improvement Protocols (EIPs), and at the time of writing, four Ethereum clients out of five have merged EIPs. The EIPs that are proposed are:

Ethereum Istanbul

• EIP 152: Blake2 compression function F precompile
• EIP 1108: alt_bn128 precompile gas costs reduction
• EIP 1344: ChainID
• EIP 1884: the trie-size-dependent opcodes
• EIP 2028: Call data gas cost reduction
• EIP 2200: Rebalance net-metered SSTORE gas cost

As for the client update, Trinity and Aleth are those clients who have to merge all the EIPs. While Parity, Nethermind, Geth, and Pantheon have merged all six of the EIPs.