Ethereum network is currently undergoing a series of upgrades which is lined up to 2021 when the Ethereum network would completely move to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus from its current Proof-of-work (PoW) mining consensus. The network has successfully completed its Istanbul upgrade, which has been a month-long process, finally commencing on December 8th at 0:25 UTC.

The Istanbul Hardfork was the 8th such major upgrade on the network since its inception and third in 2019, the previous two being February’s St. Petersburg and Constantinople hard forks. The hard-fork took place on Ethereum's 9,069,000th block.

The Istanbul hard-fork was pegged to be a major milestone in the run-up to its main goal of making the Ethereum network faster and cheaper. The upgrades goal was implemented to improving six crucial Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), out of these six EIPs three namely EIPs 1108, 2028, 2200 were aimed at reducing the Gas cost of various operations on the platform.

The other EIPs improvement included Denial-of-service (DDoS) attack resilience on EIP 1344 and Interoperability with equihash-based proof-of-work (PoW) cryptocurrencies such as zCash on EIP 152.

Vitalik Buterin claimed Ethereum would support 3,000 tps after Istanbul hard-fork

Back in November, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin had claimed that Etheruem would be able to process 3,000 transactions every second after the Istanbul hard-fork.

Scalability has been pressuring issues for Ethereum for the past couple of years especially after it became a hub for dApps. In order to improve that aspect, the developers have planned an elaborate series of upgrades and finally changed its mining protocol, which for sure would help in mining blocks more efficiently.

The code upgrade also led to the breaking of 680 smart contracts on Aragon

The 8th hard-fork on the Ethereum network for sure improved upon many shortcomings of the network right from lowering gas costs, to an increase in the number of transactions and also giving more power to the developers of the smart contract. However, the upgrade in code also led to the breaking of almost 680 smart contracts on a decentralized governing platform Aragon.

Jorge Izquierdo, CTO of Aragon One said that even though they support the continuous development on the Ethereum network, the developers should also make note of other developers on the network. The hard changes in the code meant that the smart contracts currently in work running on previous network code have to be broken.

“Developers don’t want to build on a moving target, and backward compatibility should be taken seriously as well,” Izquierdo said in an email to CoinDesk Friday.

“Ethereum is not a toy anymore, it’s a platform with a sizable investment and a big reach, and as such changes like this need to be professionally measured before being taken.”