Ethereum fork is imminent, here are the things you need to know!

Text/Wang Miaomiao from BitWu Team

After waiting for a long time, the Constantinople hard fork of Ethereum is finally getting closer and closer. This upgrade will be officially updated on the mainnet around January 16. Before that, you need to know this information!

What is the Constantinople fork?

Ethereum's initial development plan can be divided into four stages, namely Frontier, Home, Metropolis, and Serenity. Through these four stages, Ethereum's POW consensus mechanism will gradually transform into a POS consensus mechanism, and Constantinople is one of the key milestones in Ethereum's roadmap to reach version 2.0.

Constantinople is the second part of Ethereum's upgrade in the Metropolis hard fork, the first part consisting of the Byzantium hard fork implemented in October 2017. Constantinople is a backwards-compatible upgrade of the Ethereum network system to simplify the Ethereum network, reduce transaction fees and improve efficiency.

The head of the Ethereum team predicts that the hard fork will start to be updated around January 16, when the block height will reach 7080000. Once the upgrade begins, nodes running Constantinople will be incompatible with previous versions of Ethereum, resulting in a "hard fork" of the blockchain.

After the hard fork is activated, nodes will run on the new branch, and legacy nodes that continue to run on the original blockchain will no longer receive mining rewards.

Unlike the hard fork that produces two forked coins, this hard fork will not result in block splitting, but only a software update, which means that the old and new software will be incompatible. This is a transition for Ethereum to introduce the POS mechanism for the first time based on POW.

Therefore, this hard fork is considered "non-controversial" and "in line with the healthy development of Ethereum" and will be accepted by the community. So far, all major Ethereum clients have patched the upgrade, and the core development team also expressed confidence in the success of this upgrade at the meeting on January 4.

Ethereum will implement 5 major improvement protocols

In general, most upgrades are designed to reduce gas costs or make it easier for developers to perform operations by reducing the complexity of common tasks.

Constantinople proposed five different Ethereum Improvement Protocols (EIPs):

EIP 145: Implements bitwise shifting, speeds up network operations and reduces the gas cost of transactions, making it cheaper to run certain smart contracts;

EIP 1052: Introduces a new opcode that improves the efficiency of smart contract computation time;

EIP 1283: Benefits smart contract developers by introducing a fairer pricing method for changes to data storage;

EIP 1014: Created by Vitalik Buterin, it introduces state channels to the Ethereum network. Similar to the Lightning Network on Bitcoin, state channels will allow interactions outside the main chain.

EIP 1234: Reduces block mining rewards from 3 ETH to 2 ETH , as well as delaying the difficulty bomb for 12 months.

EIP 1234 is the most controversial improvement protocol in this upgrade and is bound to have an impact on the entire network.

If the Ethereum blockchain does not undergo a hard fork in the future, mining difficulty on the network will increase, verification will become slow, and activity on the network may come to a near standstill. This problem is known as the Ethereum difficulty bomb or the Ethereum Ice Age.

EIP 1234 requires delaying the acceleration of the "difficulty bomb" and reducing the mining reward for each discovered block from 3 ether to 2, which means that miners' mining income will be lower.

The market response was good before the upgrade

Constantinople made only minor changes compared to previous upgrades, but it laid the foundation for the upcoming POS mechanism and is part of Ethereum's long-term strategy to reduce mining energy consumption while increasing network capacity.

However, it is too early to predict how the change in Ethereum mining rewards will affect the price of Ethereum, which has nearly doubled since the beginning of last month from a low of $82 to $151 per coin.

From this, it can be seen that retail investors generally have a positive attitude towards the Constantinople upgrade, and the market has responded well. According to previous trends, the price of Ethereum will continue to rise before the upgrade, reach its peak on the day the upgrade is completed, and will fall back within 10 days after the upgrade.

For miners who are gradually losing their profits, this upgrade may make them become the tears of the old times. From the perspective of the entire Ethereum network ecosystem, the second half of this metropolis is destined to go down in history.