The first week of December has been exciting for the blockchain and cryptocurrency world. Perhaps the biggest news is that Ethereum's (ETH) Istanbul hard fork was completed on Sunday. The Ethereum blockchain received its third upgrade of the year at block number 9,069,000. Another iteration of Ethereum 1.x, Istanbul is the network's eighth hard fork, and all Ethereum clients that host the protocol have agreed to the new software. Istanbul includes 6 Ethereum Improvement Proposals, and they address the main issues of denial-of-service attack resilience, interoperability with equihash-based proof-of-work cryptocurrencies like Zcash (ZEC), and gas cost reduction. The cheaper gas costs enabled by Istanbul aim to boost bandwidth and support zero-knowledge privacy technologies. Some questions remain about how users need to manually migrate smart contracts between decentralized autonomous organizations due to the hard fork.

Here is the rest of the week in review:

Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange by trading volume, acquired DappReview, an evaluation platform that offers data-driven research and advertising services to blockchain-based decentralized applications. Viktor Radchenko, founder of Binance's Trust Wallet, said the exchange's acquisition of Beijing-based DappReview will help the firm further develop its existing dapps and create new blockchain use cases, adding that "Trust Wallet will integrate DappReview APIs to provide easy access to explore new dapps and crypto games, as well as more insight into DeFi services, analytics, and usage." In return, Binance will offer support for DappReview in non-technical fields, while the platform maintains its independence in technical development and operations. Founded in March 2018 by Vincent Niu, the Dapp Review platform provides data-based research services on over 3,900 dapps like wallets and exchanges on 13 public blockchains, including EOS, Ethereum, and Tron (TRX).

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) wants Telegram's former chief investment advisor to testify and hand over documents related to the tech firm's $1.7 billion 2018 token sale. The SEC asked the High Court of England and Wales to obtain the testimony and documents from John Hyman, a former investment banker with Morgan Stanley (MS  ) and Renaissance Capital who lives in the U.K. The trans-Atlantic request was revealed in a stash of documents filed by the SEC. The regulator seeks to halt the launch of TON, Telegram's blockchain project, and the issuance of tokens named grams because it considers grams an unregistered security. The SEC is hoping for Hyman's testimony, as he has been involved in raising funds for TON and communicated with multiple investors. The SEC also seeks to obtain Hyman's written communications with Telegram's executives and investors, as well as documents about his employment and own grams holdings.

Crypto prices rose slightly to $204.5 billion this week. For the majors, Ripple (XRP), Bitcoin (BTC), and Binance Coin (BNB) rose, while Bitcoin SV (BSV), Stellar (XLM), and Litecoin (LTC) fell. In the top 100, the biggest losers were Quant (QNT), down 23%, SOLVE (SOLVE), down 13%, and Chiliz (CHZ), down 10%. The biggest gainers were HedgeTrade (HEDG), up 62%, Energi (NRG), up 58%, and Matic Network (MATIC), up 52%. Next week traders will see if crypto can keep up the weekly gains.

The author owns a small amount of BTC and LTC.