Ethereum News: The much awaited Ethereum (ETH) Constantinople hard fork at block 7,080,000 is set to release by late January 2019, as decided by the core developers in a bi-weekly developer meeting on Friday, Dec. 7.
In early October, Ethereum core development team introduced the Constantinople blockchain upgrade on the network’s Ropsten testnet. It was hoped that this upgrade will decrease block rewards and divert ASICs, would be uploaded to the mainnet by October’s end. However, due to ‘Consensus Issue’ in testing, the upgrade was halted.
Following it, the dev agreed to tentatively push the upgrade to mid – January, probably the 16th. In a recent Core Developer meeting, decided to go ahead with the January blockchain upgrade. Given the press-time ETH block time of 14.3 sec, and the number of remaining blocks of around 234,431, the Constantinople upgrade is likely to become active in around 38 days from press time, or around Jan. 14, 2019, according to the data from the Ethereum blockchain explorer Etherscan.
The Constantinople hard fork will comprise of five separate Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) that are aimed to soften the transition from proof-of-work (PoW) into a more energy efficient proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus algorithm. The upgrade will supposedly change the Ethereum blockchain fundamentally along with the synchronous nodes update to the entire system.
Read more: Vitalik Buterin Claims Ethereum 2.0 Will Multiply Capacity By Thousandfolds
Launched in 2015, Ethereum is a public, open-sourced blockchain platform featuring smart contracts and its native cryptocurrency Ether. Ethereum Co-Founder, Vitalik Buterin was recently honoured with a doctorate from Switzerland’s oldest university, the University of Basel, for “outstanding achievements in fields of cryptocurrencies, smart contracts, and the design of institutions.”
The current bear market has indeed taken a toll on Ethereum as it lost its second position according to the market cap and is now the third biggest cryptocurrency by market cap at around $9.7 billion, according to data from CoinMarketCap.
After the news of Constantinople upgrade’s activation was announced Ether has surged by 10.6%, beating the performance of Bitcoin by 8.62%, in the past 24 hours, as per Live Coin Watch. ETH have had fallen to a more-than-year-to-date low at $82, the recent move has escalated it to $94.7.
Read more: Top Ethereum Price Predictions For 2019 By Crypto Experts
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