There is now just a day left before Ethereum goes through the Istanbul network upgrade. Scheduled for Saturday, December 7, this upgrade will occur at block number 9,069,000.

After Byzantium and Constantinople, Istanbul is yet another long-awaited upgrade which is part of the Ethereum network’s move from proof-of-work (PoW) to Proof-of-stake (PoS). This would be the final hard fork before Ethereum moves to Casper.

So a lot of exchanges / OTC brokers are halting deposit/withdrawal of ETH + ERC20 during a certain window for the upcoming hard fork. They warn funds sent during the window "may be lost"

How does this tie in w/ Ethereum as a global settlement layer?

— Su Zhu (@zhusu) December 5, 2019

Upcoming Improvements

The latest Istanbul update involves a total of six Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs). One of the EIP 152 implements the compression function to allow interoperability between the EVM and Zcash.

EIP 1108 will re-price the precompiles that would “greatly assist” with the privacy and scaling solutions on Ethereum. EIP 2200 is net gas metering changes for SSTORE opcode, reducing excessive gas costs, and enabling new usages for contract storage.

Due to the growth of the Ethereum state, certain opcodes have become more resource-intensive than they were previously as such EIP 1884 will raise the gas codes for those opcodes.

EIP 2028 is another one that will reduce the gas cost of Calldata from the current value of 68 gas per byte to 16 gas per byte. The reason behind this is

“higher bandwidth of Calldata improves scalability, as more data can fit within a single block.”

To take advantage of this lower gas fees, IDEX, a decentralized exchange (DEX) for ERC20 tokens is launching a new DEX on top of Rollup technology. Rollup is a layer two scalability protocol that has been made possible by this latest hard fork only.

The reduced gas fee has the Rollup-based smart contracts become a suitable scalability tool. This could help reduce gas on the new platform by as much as 90%, according to IDEX CTO Jason Ahmad.

The Growing Addresses

Before the Istanbul network upgrade is finally implemented, EtherScan announced the release of Beacon Chain 2.0 Testnet explorer.

New: Happy to announce the release of our Beacon Chain Eth 2.0 Testnet explorer (Alpha) at https://t.co/tlHWZDFEf1 running the @prylabs Prysm client. This is our first release and we will continue working and improving on this. Feedback welcomed, TQ.

— Etherscan.io (@etherscan) December 5, 2019

Also, those running the nodes are required to upgrade to the latest version of Parity Ethereum, v2.5.11-stable and v2.6.6-beta, to make sure you are Istanbul ready.

ATTENTION: If you are running Parity please update your nodes! There was an emergency patch issued yesterday. Prepare for Istanbul! https://t.co/PrRLLnhUgY

— Ethereum (@ethereum) December 6, 2019

Just before Istanbul, the new wallets on Ethereum shot up by 38,164 in just 24 hours. Just a couple days before on Dec. 2, 70,000 new addresses were also created.

#Ethereum by the Numbers:

9M+ blocks mined on @ethereum.
6 EIPs scheduled for Istanbul.
7M+ @GodsUnchained transactions.
4M+ $DAI locked in @MakerDAO.
$500M+ locked in #DeFi.
2.6M+ @trufflesuite downloads.
$2.7M+ @gitcoin platform value.

BOOM. https://t.co/3Vz4RxP9jX

— Joseph Lubin (@ethereumJoseph) December 2, 2019

The growing numbers on Ethereum Network are the result of the growth seen by DeFi (decentralized finance) that has about $450 million tied up in DeFi applications.

Ethereum price meanwhile is trading at $147, down 5% in the past 7-days, as per Coincodex.