Ethereum Istanbul Hard Fork Successfully Completed and Supported by Major Exchanges

Ethereum has successfully hit block number 9,069,000, where the Istanbul hard fork has been completed. Istanbul is Ethereum’s eighth hard fork overall, addressing issues such as denial-of-service attack resilience, interoperability with equihash-based proof-of-work and gas costs, which is the cost to send a transaction on the Ethereum network.  

The lowered gas costs enabled by Istanbul’s Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) are aimed to increase the bandwidth on the blockchain and foster zero-knowledge privacy technologies. 

Vitalik Buterin claimed that the capacity has the potential to reach 3,000 transactions per second.  

A few popular crypto exchanges have announced their official support for the Ethereum Istanbul hard fork update. The Ethereum network has witnessed the collaboration between node operators and miners to update the software to support the Istanbul hard fork. 

Binance announced its support for the Istanbul upgrade on Dec. 5, along with its US subsidiary following the next day. Coinbase has released an announcement saying that Ethereum and ERC20 deposits and withdrawals have been available once again on its trading platforms, and the node upgrade is supported. Bitfinex, Poloniex, and Kraken also announce their support for the hard fork.  

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