Contents
The following upgrades are included:
- Addition of ‘REVERT’ opcode, which permits error handling without consuming all gas (EIP 140)
- Transaction receipts now include a status field to indicate success or failure EIP 658)
- Elliptic curve addition and scalar multiplication on alt_bn128 (EIP 196) and pairing checks (EIP 197), permitting ZK-Snarks and other cryptographic mathemagic™
- Support for big integer modular exponentiation (EIP 198), enabling RSA signature verification and other cryptographic applications
- Support for variable length return values (EIP 211)
- Addition of the ‘STATICCALL’ opcode, permitting non-state-changing calls to other contracts (EIP 214)
- Changes to the difficulty adjustment formula to take uncles into account (EIP 100)
- Delay of the ice age / difficulty bomb by 1 year, and reduction of block reward from 5 to 3 ether (EIP 649)
Source: verbatim extract from this Ethereum blog post.