At block 1,150,000 on March 14, 2016, the Homestead network upgrade activated — the first major planned hard fork, marking the network's transition from beta ("Frontier") to production status.
Included EIPs
- EIP-2 — Homestead Hard-fork Changes: Increased contract creation gas cost from 21,000 to 53,000 gas, preventing certain denial-of-service patterns. Tightened transaction signature rules to require low-s values only, eliminating transaction malleability — a class of attacks where valid transaction hashes could be altered without changing the transaction itself.
- EIP-7 — DELEGATECALL: Added opcode 0xf4, which calls another contract's code while preserving the caller's context (msg.sender and msg.value). This is the foundation for proxy patterns and upgradeable contracts — the called contract's code executes as if it were the calling contract's own code.
- EIP-8 — devp2p Forward Compatibility: Modified the peer-to-peer networking layer to accept packets with unknown future fields. Prevents network fragmentation during future protocol upgrades by ensuring older nodes don't disconnect from newer nodes advertising updated capabilities.
Significance
Homestead established the network as production-ready. DELEGATECALL enabled the library and proxy contract patterns that underpin most modern smart contract architectures. The transaction malleability fix removed a persistent security concern inherited from early Ethereum.