Ethereum’s Istanbul Hard Fork, What Will Change? - Crypto Briefing
While no single proposal is particularly comprehensive, the cumulative upgrades should expand the possibilities for smart contract developers to introduce large-scale features to the Ethereum chain, such as privacy protocols and side-chain scaling. Ethereum developers identified these changes as crucial for a number of projects building on the platform: AZTEC protocol and ZEther are working to implement zero-knowledge proofs and Confidential Transactions for creating private transactions on the Ethereum chain; Matter Labs and Rollup utilize this cryptography to build side-chain scaling solutions.
Its main use case is to enable trustless atomic swaps between the Ethereum and Zcash chains, providing a way to tap into the privacy coin without relying on centralized exchange operators. During a contentious hard fork, such as the one that created Ethereum Classic, the smart contracts may incorrectly pass the data to the wrong chain — an event that could result in loss of funds.
