Ethereum’s Much Awaited Constantinople Hard Fork to Occur at Block Number 7,080,000

During the latest developers’ meet, the team members looked confident about the release of Constantinople hard fork by mid of January 2019.

On Friday, December 8, Ethereum core-developers gathered for a bi-weekly wherein the reached to an important conclusion on the much-awaited Constantinople hard fork. The core developers’ team finally agreed to launch the hard fork on block number 7,080,000. Afri Schoedon, the release manager for Parity Ethereum client says that this can tentatively happen between January 14-18.

The Constantinople upgrade will be a major overhaul to the Ethereum network. Some of the major changes include solving the issues with difficulty bomb, ProgPow implementation, and others. However, the Ethereum developers have been struggling for the Constantinople upgrade for quite some time.

The decision to postpone Constantinople first arrived in October after the “consensus issue” on trial upgrade on the Ropsten testnet. Later, during the November’s developer meeting, the core teams members agreed to push the hard fork to mid-January. Core developer Péter Szilágyi said: “We can just say mid-January, it doesn’t make difference if we decide on a date or not. We can always postpone.”

Key Take-Aways from the Latest Developers’ Meet

Needless to say, the upcoming Constantinople hardfork will bring the essential design changes to streamline Ethereum’s platform code.

Martin Swende, who is also a security lead for the go-ethereum client said that the Constantinople upgrade will also have a safety feature. Swende said that the go-ethereum software release will feature an emergency switch to delay the upgrade in case things go wrong.

Yesterday’s meeting had a positive impact on Ethereum’s (ETH) price. After losing nearly 15% on Friday, Ethereum is showing a bit of recovery today. At the press time, ETH is 5% up trading at $90.10 with a market cap of $9.3 billion. Below is the video of the Friday’s metting.