3 Ethereum Hard Forks in January

3 Ethereum Hard Forks in January

The first of these three forks is Classic Vision. As of January 11, 2019, all Ethereum holders will receive three Classic Vision (ETCV) coins for each ETH in their wallets. Only one day later, the Ethereum Nowa Fork (ETN) follows. Each ETH holder receives ETN in his wallet in a ratio of 1: 1. Constantinople-Fork, taking place on 16 January, is the most important of the three. Hard Fork, planned for block # 708000000, is an important part of Ethereum’s transition from using a proof-of-work mechanism to a proof-of-stake mechanism. But what exactly does that mean for Hodler?

Will the forks reduce the value of ETH?

Ethereum is at a difficult point. Maybe now more than ever. Competitors such as Cardano, EOS and Zilliqa are gaining in popularity despite having lost 90% of their value over the past year. Adding to the fact that hard forks tend to weaken general support for a particular blockchain network is a potentially dire situation for Ethereum.

Since the Constantinople-Fork Ethereum will help launch the POS protocol, this could be the kind of positive hype that ETH needs for a bull run. Ultimately, investors need to know that ETH is currently in transition and needs to prepare accordingly.

Ethereum Classic Vision (ETCV)

A snapshot of the ETH network will be taken on January 11, 2019. ALL users who hold ETH in their personal wallets at the moment of the snapshot will receive 3 ETCV per each ETH after the fork.

Note: you must hold ETH in your personal wallet (Jaxx, Coinomi, MyEtherWallet, Ledger Nano, etc.) to get your free ETCV after the fork. Exchange wallets are not accepted!

Whitepaper: https://ethereumcv.io/whitepaper.pdfWebsite: https://ethereumcv.io/#subscribe

Ethereum Nowa Fork (ETN)

On 12th of January, 2019, Ethereum Nowa Fork will happen, where the ETH owners will get 1 ETN (Ethereum Nowa) coin for every  ETH in their private wallets. The ETN Nowa roadmap says that it is going to come up with ETN desktop wallet by Q2 2019, and even mobile wallets (Android, iOS, WP). By Q3 and Q4, the Ethereum Nowa decentralized exchange and blockchain messenger is expected to be launched.

The Ethereum Nowa hard fork is in the debate because few users on the BitcoinTalk forum has warned about a potential scam related to the ETN hard fork.

Ethereum Constantinople Hard Fork

The major and the most significant ETH hard fork happening between before 14th to 18th January 2019. The Constantinople Ethereum hard fork, which is the 2nd phase of the Metropolis project, is expected to be built on 7080000 blocks, improving efficiency and performance. This is undertaken as a step to transit from Proof of Work (PoW) protocol to Proof of Stake (PoS) protocol (Casper update). This is expected to make the ETH network faster and less costly to operate. It might be controversial as it would decrease the miners’ reward from 3 ETH to 2 ETH as well.

  • EIP 145: An upgrade which will efficiently detail and process the information processing on the ETH blockchain known as bitwise shifting. This will use 10 times lesser gas than before, which eventually would make the smart contracts cheaper to use.
  • EIP 1052: Optimising large scale code execution on the blockchain. Unique hash adoption would make the other contract verification easier as well as efficient.
  • EIP 1283: The pricing method will be made fairer and simpler in case of contract storage (SSTORE opcode). It would lower the gas cost as new uses would be enabled for data storage.
  • EIP 1014: Vitalik Buterin made scaling solution based on off-chain transactions and state channels similar to Bitcoin’s Lightning Network, which will automatically improve the performance of the network.
  • EIP 1234: The reduction in block mining reward would delay the difficulty bomb for a period of 12 months. This would create ruckus amongst the miners as their block reward would decrease as happened earlier during the Ethereum Classic(ETC) hard fork. So, this difficulty bomb would make it impossible to mine after a certain point and would freeze the entire network, hence its also known as Ethereum’s ice age. The developers would keep on improving and the miners has to adopt the update, else wouldn’t be able to profit from mining.

More details about the changes can found here: https://github.com/ethereum/pm/wiki/Constantinople-Progress-Tracker

image by Shutterstock

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