Ethereum Istanbul hard fork is imminent, and the upgrade rate of major client nodes is less than 40%

According to Trustnodes on December 4, the Ethereum Istanbul hard fork will take place in three days, but only 38% and 42% of the nodes of Ethereum clients Geth and Parity have completed the upgrade respectively.

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According to data from Ethernodes, 1,035 Geth nodes have completed the upgrade, but nearly 1,700 have not yet been upgraded. Parity has 338 nodes that have been upgraded, and nearly 500 have not yet been upgraded.

Ethereum Istanbul hard fork node upgrade diagram in December 2019

The above chart only tracks 3,500 Ethereum nodes, which are defined as "ready and synced clients seen on the Ethereum network in the past 24 hours."

The Ethereum network has a total of about 7,000 accessible nodes, but only half of them are active, and less than half of them have been upgraded.

Assuming that both miners and enterprise nodes have upgraded, the overall ratio is not necessarily important, because other nodes only validate for themselves, not for the public like enterprise nodes, or for produced blocks like miners.

So technically, it doesn’t matter as far as the network is concerned that less than half of users have upgraded, but it is a hard fork, which means that non-upgraded nodes will not be able to operate after December 7th.

Such slow node upgrades are not uncommon, but it does indicate a general lack of interest in the fork, which is largely a maintenance upgrade without any major features that the ethereum community usually focuses on.

Conversely, some improvements to gas efficiency allow miners to increase the gas limit (block size), but their capacity limits are more political than technical.

Miners generally agree that a few transactions with high fees bring them more profits than many transactions with low fees.

However, such fees are currently quite low, around $100,000 per day, but this figure reached $5 million per day in January 2018.

Despite a significant drop in the orphan block rate (uncle blocks), miners are still keeping capacity at a fairly limited level, and this situation looks to continue for at least another year or more, but at least Ethereum will have an upgrade this year.