Ethereum's Istanbul hard fork has been activated on December 8th. The upgrade was carried out in order to balance the cost of gas (fees), improve the scalability of solutions based on zero-knowledge proof and strengthen the protection against DoS attacks and provide compatibility with privacy coin Zcash. The event did not affect of ETH price at all, which stays at the low regions below EMA-ribbon. In fact, the price pretty much came back to the same level where it started at the beginning of the year and came down almost 60% since this year’s peak at $363.