Ethereum Constantinople Hard Fork Might Release On January 16th

Ethereum News: Ethereum (ETH) enthusiasts have been waiting for the Constantinople upgrade for a while and there wait might end as soon as January 16th. During the Ethereum core developer meeting held last Friday, the team has come up with a new timeline for the implementation of the  Constantinople upgrade.

The minutes of the meeting currently available on GitHub suggests that two dates of January 2019, i.e. the 16th and the 12th have been proposed and pondered over.

The January 16th Date

The core-developers, most of them believe that the hard fork should go live in mid-January after the Holiday season. One of the core developers had this to say about the timeline.

If this is a viable option (can’t completely judge the overall effort needed to get this in place + communicate this), I would like to make the following adopted timeline suggestion:

December 10th (Monday), 2018:
Start of a new PoW testnet, deprecate Ropsten

January 16th (Wednesday), 2019:
Fork on the new testnet

February 12th (Tuesday), 2019:
Fork on mainnet

Constantinople

One of the largest upgrades on the Ethereum network is till date, Constantinople success would bring in five Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIP), mentioned below:

1. EIP 145: Introduces Native bitwise shifting instructions which are more efficient for processing transactions on the network
2. EIP 1218: Allows blocks to be directly aware of block hashes much older than the current hash
3. EIP 1014: to implement scaling based upon state channels and off-chain transactions
4. EIP 1052: optimizes large-scale code execution on the network
5. EIP 1283: proposes the reduction of excessive gas costs where it does not match how the most implementation works

As aforementioned Ethereum enthusiasts have been waiting for this upgrade with bated breath, an indication towards a supposed date has most investors, developers perked up. While the news hasn’t affected the price point of ethereum as of yet, it is expected to eventually see some rise as the news is spread across.

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