Péter Szilágyi, core ethereum developer, has confirmed through his official Twitter account that the next hard fork of the network is scheduled for December 4.
The developer has said that the hard fork should be activated at block 9,069,000 and has provided Geth mainnet node operators with a link to a maintenance solution to start the hard fork process.
Geth is one of the two largest clients used to operate nodes on the ethereum network, the other being Parity.
The most remarkable innovation of the Istanbul hard fork is the implementation of a new proof-of-work (PoW) consensus algorithm called "ProgPoW", which aims to fight the advantage of ASIC miners.
The mining of cryptocurrencies based on the proof-of-work algorithm had been so far dominated by this type of devices, which are manufactured with a very powerful hardware in order to obtain the highest profitability.
The arrival of this type of devices to the market has negatively affected miners who mine directly with the GPUs of their computers, since these are much less powerful than ASIC miners. Istanbul intends to change this situation.
Subscribe to our Telegram channel to stay up to date on the latest crypto and blockchain news.