Homestead is the first major update of the Ethereum platform, following on the heels of the original Frontier release. The fork marked a major step forward finally enabling the transfer of ETH between wallets and the ability of users to write and deploy smart contracts.
Network improvement upgrades included:
EIP-2 Main homestead hardfork changes
EIP-7 Hardfork EVM update: DELEGATECALL
EIP-8 devp2p forward compatibility