Ethereum Istanbul hard fork was successfully implemented on block 9,069,000.
This hard fork is still considered Ethereum 1.0 with Ethereum 2.0 targeted for sometime in 2021.
Istanbul Hard Fork Goals:
- DDos Protection
- Integration with PoW cryptocurrencies
- Gas prices
Most exchanges have already implemented the needed changes and are back online.
This hard fork reduces the ability to spam blocks on the network and disables the difficulty time bomb.
Istanbul Hard Fork EIP breakdown:
EIP 512
"This EIP will enable the BLAKE2b hash function and other higher-round 64-bit BLAKE2 variants to run cheaply on the EVM, allowing easier interoperability between Ethereum and Zcash as well as other Equihash-based PoW coins."
EIP 1108
"The elliptic curve arithmetic precompiles are currently overpriced. Re-pricing the precompiles would greatly assist a number of privacy solutions and scaling solutions on Ethereum."
EIP 1344
"This EIP adds an opcode that returns the current chain’s EIP-155 unique identifier."
EIP 1884
"This EIP proposes repricing certain opcodes, to obtain a good balance between gas expenditure and resource consumption."
EIP 2028
"We propose to reduce the gas cost of Calldata (GTXDATANONZERO) from its current value of 68 gas per byte to 16 gas per byte, to be backed by mathematical modeling and empirical estimates. The mathematical model is the one used in the works of Sompolinsky and Zohar [1] and Pass, Seeman and Shelat [2], which relates network security to network delay. We shall (1) evaluate the theoretical impact of lower Calldata gas cost on network delay using this model, (2) validate the model empirically, and (3) base the proposed gas cost on our findings."
EIP 2200
"This is an EIP that implements net gas metering. It's a combined version of EIP-1283 and EIP-1706, with a structured definition so as to make it interoperable with other gas changes such as EIP-1884."