I got an email from the exchange I use stating the Istanbul hard fork is to occur at block 9069000 at approximately 15:44:36 PST on December 7. It happened already but they have suspended all deposits and withdrawals from happening until further notice.
It is not a contentious fork and so does not result in any new coins from it happening.
So why would they decide to suspend all transactions of ethereum?
I guess this is a good deal because we will see improvements but it is also risky because it is a hard fork that we don't know if works or not. Maybe it would be full of bugs and would be horrible and there would be double spending and all sorts of things, or maybe it would be the amazing thing that we have been waiting for.
I still can't believe one day ethereum could be a staking coin, think about it, there was a company that got 1 billion dollars in funding for their own token project, if they got that much ethereum when it was staking, even if it is just 1% per year (will probably be bigger) that would be 10 million dollars per year just for keeping it there, how many companies in crypto world actually has bigger than 10 million dollars a year expense anyway? Staking will change ICO world.