According to recent news, members of the Ethereum core development team have reached an agreement to activate the Constantinople hard fork on block 7,080,000. If everything goes according to plan, Constantinople will go live between January 14 and 18 of 2019. Exciting!
Ethereum (ETH) core developers have agreed to launch the long-awaited Constantinople. If the hard fork is not going to be postponed, then January will be a BIG month for Ethereum. Constantinople is one of Ethereum’s largest upgrades to date, which will change the infrastructure of the Ethereum blockchain.
The upgrade aims at increasing the efficiency of the Ethereum blockchain while decreasing the mining rewards from 3 ETH to 2 ETH per block. This, of course, has a huge impact on the mining business, making it less profitable to mine Ethereum for miners.
The upcoming Constantinople hard fork includes five separate Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) in order to soften the transition from proof-of-work (PoW) to more energy efficient proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus algorithm.
The hard fork was originally planned for release in November of this year. However, issues on the testnet release forced developers to delay the upgrade. That a new date has been set, does not mean that this will also be the date that the hard fork will happen. Péter Szilágyi, a core developer at Ethereum, said:
“We can just say mid-January, it doesn’t make a difference if we decide on a date or not. We can always postpone.”
Proof-of-Stake
The current Ethereum token economy is going to change drastically when the Casper protocol is introduced a few months later, of which Constantinople lays the foundation. With Casper, Ethereum is starting the transition from a Proof-of-Work to a Proof-of-Stake system. Where Proof-of-Work requires energy-consuming calculations to minimize Proof-of-Stake offers an alternative with a number of major advantages. At Proof-of-Stake, it’s not the miners but the ‘stakeholders’, or owners of tokens, who are able to get the merits of the network.
Currently, the block rewards at Proof-of-Work are paid to the miners, Proof-of-Stake also pays out to the users who are staking. Because no complicated calculations are carried out, unlike with Proof-of-Work, it is possible to stake Ethereum with virtually any computer, making it much more energy-efficient and transactions can be executed at lightning speed.
