The Real Discussion About Ethereum's Next Hard Fork Is About to Begin

More than two dozen ethereum improvement proposals have been submitted for review and inclusion in ethereum's next system-wide upgrade or hard fork, dubbed Istanbul.

"We'll talk more on the All Core Devs Gitter channel to wrangle in some of these EIPs that are still stuck in proposed and as quickly as possible decide on which ones are being implemented for Istanbul," said Ethereum Foundation community relations lead Hudson Jameson before ending today's call.

As noted by Jameson, the hard deadline for all Istanbul EIP submissions passed last Friday and now developers are working to reach agreement about which proposed EIPs can be deemed officially "Accepted."

The one EIP to receive a tentative approval Friday was EIP 1108, which proposes a minor change to gas fees on the ethereum network.

Developer Rick Dudley explained that EIP 1559 - which introduces a new transaction fee model to ethereum - is "a pretty complicated change."

Looking ahead. The next official deadline for the Istanbul hard fork is merging accepted EIPs into existing versions of ethereum software called clients.

The envisioned timeline for Istanbul is a rather new creation that has never been replicated by previous ethereum hard forks.

It was proposed by former ethereum developer Afri Schoedon and Ethereum Foundation developer Alex Beregszaszi as a way of breaking down hard fork process into "a fixed 9-month cycle."

For now, blockchain protocol engineer at Consensys Danno Ferrin affirms that at the very least, the list of proposed Istanbul EIPs "stops growing" and will in all likelihood begin shrinking.

Down the road, the software upgrade itself must be accepted by the nodes that underpin the ethereum network itself when the hard fork event actually occurs.