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Ethereum’s network is currently experiencing an upgrade. The hard fork is known as Constantinople and it will be implementing four different EIP proposals. This is very important for Ethereum since this hard fork was already postponed several times in the past.
Ethereum’s Constantinople Hard Fork
After years of development and delays, the Constantinople upgrade is currently taking place. The websites that are now following this upgrade are currently down due to a large number of users on them.
The main question is related to what will be changing with this upgrade? According to Ethereum, there will be four main changes to the network. The upgrade took place at block 7,280,000 and included four Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs).
The EIP 145 adds native functionality to the protocol so that it is cheaper and easier to do certain activities on the Ethereum chain. The EIP 1014 makes users interact with addresses that have not yet been created. The EIP 1052 makes it cheaper for users to do certain things on chain reducing the gas required.
Perhaps, the most important and discussed upgrade is related to the EIP 1234. This delays the difficulty bomb and adjusts the block reward for miners.
Ethereum developers explain how this would work:
“The average block times are increasing due to the difficulty bomb (also known as the “ice age”) slowly accelerating. This EIP proposes to delay the difficulty bomb for approximately 12 months and to reduce the block rewards to adjust for the ice age delay.”
Moreover, Ethereum miners are going to be receiving 2 ETH instead of 3 ETH every single time they find a block. This means that there will be a lower issuance of ETH in the market. In an eventual increase in the demand for ETH, the price of the digital asset could start to increase at faster rates.
The new ETH issuance will be capped at $1 million a day at current prices. In a year, that means that the new ETH supply will be close to $365 million. Block times will move to 15 seconds rather than 20 seconds.
Due to different reasons, this hard fork couldn’t be implemented in the past. This is why it ended up being applied now, on February 28.
Ethereum is currently being traded around $137 and it has a market capitalization of $14.38 billion.