Ethereum is now going through hard times. Recently its price has decreased below $100. Therefore, the “king of ICOs” needs changes to be done to improve its scalability and other features. Three hardforks are planned in January 2019. There’s a catch in this somewhere.
Contents
What to Expect from Constantinople Update?
Constantinople is the second stage of a big update, which is called Metropolis. The first part of the update is called Byzantium. Its main purpose is to simplify transferring of Ethereum from PoW to PoS algorithm. The update will not totally make the platform PoS-based, but this is a huge step forward.
Constantinople update will decrease fees for transactions in the Ethereum blockchain and will improve ETH effectiveness as a whole.
Constantinople improvements have different markings, in particular, the following ones:
- EIP 145 – increases speed of arithmetical operations in EVM;
- EIP 1052 – improves data compression, enhancing speed of smart contracts’ validation;
- EIP 1234 – reduces block reward, delays “difficulty bomb”.
The important thing: the hardfork is “non-contentious”, Reddit and Twitter users aren’t fighting about it, as it was with BCHABC and BCHSV. It will not lead to occurrence of separate coins, more precisely, “old ethers” will be unpriced. “New ethers” will be complete “successors”. Buterin think that the Ether community should call thinks like this “network upgrades”.
Some experts expect further price increase prior to Constantinople hardfork. It will also make the platform more technological, which doubtlessly affect ETH price, at least in long-term perspective (because in short-term, directly after the fork, the price may slightly fall).
What Should ETH Hodlers Do?
If you have ETH on MEW, any other wallet or exchange, you should do nothing. But if you are a miner, you should point your miner to the new chain, as instructed by the project developers in Reddit. Don’t give your private key to anyone (who can offer you “proper transition” to new network), it’s a trap. Defrauders are everywhere.
When Will It Happen?
The hardfork was initially planned to be happened in the late 2018. However, The Ethereum team noted that they were seeking to prevent controversies during the update development. The process of development took much time to eliminate security vulnerabilities, which were a cause of The DAO hacking in 2016, leading to ETH hardhorking with Ethereum Classic occurrence.
The date was finally scheduled to 16th January, block number 7,080,000. Péter Szilágyi, an Ethereum core developer, published this in his Twitter.
That could have been the end of the story, however, it wasn’t. The day before the scheduled date, it was announced that the next update of the update date. The team was not ready to solve the problem of network security in a timely manner.
The network was updated on February 28, 2019 at the block 7280000.
Are Other Hardhorks Reliable?
Several Twitter accounts and news portals have described two new ETH hardforks, namely Nowa and ETCV. But they have some signs of scam. Nowa had fake team on its website (stock photos, non-existing names), which was deleted after one Bitcointalk user’s post where he minutely described the trick. In addition, their claims about ETN listing on top exchanges are scam. However, some folks have taken the bait, as the “official” Nowa address has received about 5,5 ethers ($830).
What about ETCV? It doesn’t seem to be a promising project, despite that developers promise faster transactions, fair rewards and other features. There is no data about team and company on Ethereum Classic Vision website.
Binance crypto exchange has mentioned it will support Constantinople. But there is no information about Nowa and ETHSV airdrops, which is another sign of their unreliableness.
The Bottom Line
Constantinople is an important enhancement and a fundament for next improvements in the Ethereum network. Two other hardforks are just things for hype, nothing more. One of them is most likely a scam project. So be careful and hold your crypto funds without rash actions.
Follow CIB’s channel on Telegram and/or subscribe to our newsletter!
