Byzantium has already been activated, after Ethereum reached block 4.370.000, in which this fork was scheduled to enter, without major news and that implements some significant improvements.

The Byzantium forced fork within the Ethereum blockchain network, has entered into force around 1AM (UTC), around 7.30 in the morning in Spain. This was planned when block 4.370.000 was held, providing an improvement in the scalability of Ethereum, within the Metropolis framework, which is divided into several parts, including this Byzantium, which adds new features and provides technical innovations that help to the capitalization of the second cryptocurrency on the market. It will follow this fork, Constantinople, which should be activated in 2018.

The difficulty of this cryptocurrency is at 3.017TB and the reward per block is 5 ethers, while the average gas is located at 21gwei, in addition, the commissions for each Ethereum transaction usually move between $ 0.0072 and 2.89 $. The value of Ethereum in recent weeks is stuck at $ 330-360, far from the $ 400 in June. Regarding its market capitalization, it currently has $ 32.660 billion of capitalization and a great force in the market, being the only one that has passed to Bitcoin in terms of transaction volume.

Several urgent updates were also launched on the 14th within Ethereum clients, to prevent possible DDoS-type attacks on the network of this cryptocurrency. The Ethereum Virtual Machina vulnerability has been fixed through updates for Parity and Geth clients, which allows running full nodes, if users need it. The fork, among other things, has implemented Zk-SNARKS, a protocol that has its origin in Zcash and was developed to guarantee the privacy of transactions. If everything works fine and there are no problems, the value of Ethereum may skyrocket in the next few days.