In this article, you will learn what is hard fork in crypto. The term 'Hard Fork' will be familiar to those in the crypto field. They can simply call as a network upgrade, but in real terms, it means more than that.
What is Hard Fork in Crypto?
Blockchain hard forks occur as a way to meet the needs of the community using a particular cryptocurrency. They may be necessary because of faults on the older version of the software, to add new functionalities, or because of disagreements among the cryptocurrency over the community that the cryptocurrency is headed.
A hard fork creates two versions of the blockchain which are not compatible with each other. This means that nodes running on the new version of the blockchain will not recognize transactions being made on the old version, and vice-versa. All nodes on the blockchain must agree to the change for the hard fork to happen.
Many in the world of crypto are looking forward to the Ethereum 2.0 hard fork, which is set to deliver several upgrades to Ethereum 2.0, such as giving nodes the capability to run on mobile devices.
About Istanbul Hard Fork
Another iteration of Ethereum 1.x, Istanbul is the network's eighth hard fork overall with the first code changes being approved in June 2019. (Eth 2, the network's major transition to proof-of-stake (PoS), is expected in 2021. ) Being non-contentious, all ethereum clients – which host and independently upgrade the ethereum protocol themselves – have agreed to the new software.
Istanbul includes six Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), specific code changes to the ethereum protocol, including EIPs 152, 1108, 1344, 1844, 2028 and 2200.
EIP's are Ethereum Improvement Proposals that are debated and discussed before every Ethereum hard fork. Anyone can write an EIP and propose their improvement for the Ethereum network. In total 11 EIP's were proposed for the Istanbul upgrade and six were selected for implementation. EIP's that were accepted for Istanbul:
EIP-152: Adds Blake2 compression function F precompile. 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: Reduce alt_bn128 precompile gas costs because elliptic curve arithmetic precompiled are currently overpriced. Repricing the precompiled would greatly assist a number of privacy solutions and scaling solutions on Ethereum.
EIP-1344: Currently, there is no specification for how chain ID is set for a particular network and instead relies on choices made manually by the client implementers and the chain community. This EIP proposes to use the chain ID to prevent replay attacks between different chains and it would be beneficial to have the same possibility inside smart contracts when handling signatures, especially in regards to Layer 2 signature schemes.
EIP-1844: The rapid growth of the Ethereum state has caused certain opcodes to be more resource-intensive than they were previously. Therefore, this EIP reprices certain opcodes, to obtain a good balance between gas expenditure and resource consumption.
EIP-2028: Calling on-chain data requires paying gas on the Ethereum network. Part of the EIP will reduce the gas cost from its current value of 68 gas per byte to 16 gas per byte which will help increase the bandwidth as more data can fit into a single block.
EIP-2200: Provides a structured definition of net gas metering changes for SSTORE opcode, enabling new usages for contract storage, and reducing excessive gas costs where it doesn't match how most implementation works.
Bottom Line
Istanbul hard fork made a lot of changes to the network on the way to developing Ethereum 2.0. If you want to know what is hard fork in crypto, this article supports about it and about Istanbul hard fork.
