What is Ethereum Constantinople Hard Fork

With the major Ethereum Constantinople hard fork just three days ahead, it is time for Guarda Wallet to break down the basics of this update in our overview article. You might have seen a lot of information on the January hard forks already, but do not get yourself lost in the sea of information like some of the people, unfortunately, did. What we mean by that is sending your private keys to the services that are, so to say, questionable – like Ethereum Classic Vision and Ethereum Nowa “forks”. If you have not heard this story yet, you can read about Guarda team making research of these two fraudulent projects on major cryptocurrency media like CCN and Cointelegraph.

While Guarda was doing the best for the safety of the crypto community, the time for  Constantinople fork was getting closer and closer – the official Ethereum fork date is the 16th of January 2019. A good time to talk about the details, right?

What is Constantinople hard fork?

There are five Ethereum Improvement proposals (later EIPs) that Constantinople is going to bring. Once the upgrade is implemented, all five of the EIPs will alter the Ethereum blockchain. As it happened during the hard forks, all the nodes need to be updated at once to continue working together.

Pretty much everybody knows that hard forks are radical – and dramatic – events for a taken blockchain. Just remembering the whole Hash War happening last year around Bitcoin Cash still sends shivers down our spines. Constantinople, sure, is very big for Ethereum network, but the thing is that majority of the users will not even notice it happening. Due to this, we can call Constantinople fork a maintenance update (there is no way this name makes Constantinople lose its value, though). There are several great technical improvements that Constantinople is carrying – these things are going to change Ethereum fee structure, speed and efficiency of the network itself and other, perhaps slightly smaller, things.

Ethereum block reward reducing after the hard fork was probably the most notable change that is bringing quite a bit of nervousness to the Ethereum miners community. Developers, however, are sure that the update will be taken well.

What will the changes be?

We have already mentioned that there will be five EIPs introduced to the network during Constantinople hard fork. Here is a more detailed description of these proposals:

1. (EIP 145) A technical upgrade, offering a more efficient method of processing the information.
2. (EIP 1052) This proposal is aimed at optimising the large-scale code execution.
3. (EIP 1283) Mostly focused on the lives of smart contract developers, this proposal is meant to introduce a better pricing method for the changes made to data storage.
4. (EIP 1014) This proposal was actually created by Vitalik Buterin himself and is focused on facilitating the scaling solution based on state channels and transactions off-chain.
5. (EIP 1234) Last, but not least upgrade is reducing the block reward to 2 ETH and delaying the difficulty bomb for a period of a year.

All these EIPs will sure have a significant impact on Ethereum blockchain. However, there is even more change to come once Constantinople is implemented. The gradual Proof of Stake transition is possible the point that is the most interesting to the Ethereum community, according to the recent Google searches. Guarda Wallet is waiting for the change to be performed to Ethereum network and is sure ready to support Constantinople once it is released.

The users of Guarda Wallet do not need to do anything special during the upgrade, besides being cautious and not putting their private keys into not trusted services. This is the first rule, after all.