Ethereum dual protocol upgrade is coming. Can “Constantinople” and “Saint Petersburg” stir up the currency market?

The two major Ethereum protocol updates, Constantinople and St. Petersburg, are scheduled to be carried out simultaneously at the 7280000th Ethereum block, and the exact date may change depending on the block time. According to the current situation, the approximate time will be around 3:50 am on March 1st, Beijing time. Readers can check the two sites https://amberdata.io/blocks/7280000 and http://forkmon.ethdevops.io/ to track the updates.

Why are there two protocol updates happening at the same time?

"Constantinople" and "Saint Petersburg" are the names of the two major updates of the Ethereum network this time. Previous network upgrades were named by other names (such as Byzantium). The reason why the Ethereum network will have two upgrade names this time is that the originally planned Constantinople upgrade was delayed due to a vulnerability. In order to solve the problems on the Ethereum test network (such as Ropsten), it is necessary to perform the "Saint Petersburg" upgrade at the same block number time point to delete the vulnerability on the test network. Therefore, there will be two updates at the same time (the word update is used because "Saint Petersburg" is only responsible for deleting an EIP with a vulnerability).

As Ethereum users or Ethereum holders, what do we need to do?

If you are using an exchange (such as CoinBase, Binance, etc.), a web wallet service (such as Metamask, MyCrypto, or MyEtherWallet, etc.), a mobile wallet service (such as CoinBase Wallet, imtoken, etc.), or a hardware wallet (such as Ledger, Trezor, or Keepkey), you do not need to take any action unless the service provider notifies you to take other measures.

Normally, these two upgrades wouldn't create any valuable candy.

As a node operator or miner, you will be faced with the choice of whether to upgrade the client:

1. The latest geth client (v1.8.23)

2. The latest Parity client (V2.2.10-stable version)

3. The latest Harmony client (v2.3 Build 74)

4. The latest Pantheon client (v0.9.1)

5. The latest EthereumJS virtual machine client (v2.6.0)

6. The latest Ethereum Wallet/Mist (v0.11.1)

If the node or miner is not updated to the latest version (as listed above), once the network is upgraded, the client it runs will be synchronized to the old network, resulting in a fork. However, since the old fork has no incentives and community support, this forked chain may die soon.

In general, Constantinople will bring efficiency improvements to the Ethereum platform, while delaying the so-called "difficulty bomb" and reducing block rewards (3eth to 2eth), which I believe everyone has already known.

What changes have been made in this Constantinople upgrade?

There have been some changes in this Constantinople upgrade. Here are the updated contents:

EIP 145: Bit shift instructions in the EVM virtual machine

In short: this EIP adds native functionality to the protocol so that it is cheaper and easier to do certain things on-chain.

EIP 1014: Skinny CREATE2

A new opcode is added at 0xf5 which accepts 4 stack parameters: endowment , memory_start , memory_length , salt .

In short: this EIP enables you to interact with addresses that have not yet been created.

EIP 1052: EXTCODEHASH opcode

This EIP specifies a new opcode that returns a keccak256 hash of the contract code.

In short: this EIP makes it cheaper (requires less gas) to do certain things on the Ethereum chain.

EIP 1234: Constantinople difficulty bomb delay and block reward adjustment

This EIP proposes to delay the difficulty bomb by approximately 12 months and reduce block rewards to adjust for the ice age delay.

By comparing with the last Constantinople upgrade content, we found that this time Constantinople lacks an EIP, which is EIP 1283 .

What is the "St. Petersburg" upgrade for?

Before the Ethereum mainnet is upgraded, test networks such as Ropsten are upgraded to test changes. The initial Constantinople upgrade has been applied on the testnet, and it includes a vulnerable EIP 1283 proposal. There is a serious vulnerability in this proposal. This vulnerability makes existing contracts vulnerable to a "reentrancy attack" through which attackers can enter the network and steal user funds.

Obviously, EIP 1283 can be regarded as a "cancer" for the Ethereum network, and the "St. Petersburg" upgrade is to delete EIP 1283 that exists in various test networks.

Therefore a second network update was required to reverse the original Constantinople changes. This update was called St. Petersburg and occurred at the same block number as Constantinople.

What specific impact will this upgrade have on Ethereum?

1. First of all, after the block interval returns to normal levels, the theoretical tps of the Ethereum network will remain unchanged. EIP-1024 will optimize the state channel, which can bring optimization to Layer 2 solutions such as Raiden.

2. Reduce the gas fees required to send transactions and the computation time required to verify smart contracts;

3. Miners’ income will fluctuate. Due to the approaching production cut, the block interval of the Ethereum network has been adjusted (normally about 15 seconds, currently 20 seconds). Before the Ethereum block production cut, the daily ETH output of the entire network had already declined in advance (currently close to 12,500 ETH/day).

As shown in the two pictures below.

(Figure: Ethereum block interval)

(Figure: Daily output of new tokens on the Ethereum network)

Historically, a similar situation occurred before the first production cut of the Ethereum network. At that time, the Ethereum block interval was as high as 30 seconds, and the daily output was close to halving. After the production cut, the block interval gradually returned to 15 seconds.

According to the normal 15-second block interval, the daily output of Ethereum will be around 11,520 ETH after the production cut, which will still be lower than the current level.

But in general, the impact of production cuts on miners is not that great.

Whether these two major protocol upgrades will have an impact on the price of Ethereum and even the entire currency market will have to be verified by the market.

Reference: https://blog.ethereum.org/2019/02/22/ethereum-constantinople-st-petersburg-upgrade-announcement/

https://hackernoon.com/what-is-going-on-with-the-ethereum-hard-fork-update-constantinople-f453af698c0c