Preparing for Istanbul: New Parity Ethereum release

Today we released new versions of Parity Ethereum, 2.5.8-stable and 2.6.3-beta. The most noteworthy improvement in this release is the incorporation of all EIPs required for the Istanbul hard fork.

This release also fixes certain security and performance issues, one of which was suspected to be consensus-threatening but turned out to be benign. Thanks to Martin Holst Swende and Felix Lange from the Ethereum Foundation for bringing the suspicious issue to our attention.

While most of the Istanbul code is in place, we are waiting for the predetermined block numbers to add them to the chain specs. We will do another release once those numbers are available.

Please read more about the breakdown of the changes in our changelog.