Ethereum Could See Its Next Hard Fork In The Near Future

By Ravindra Chagetha

Constantinople, the next upgrade for the Ethereum system, is being tested and implemented by developers.

This is the latter part of a two-fold upgrade and seeks to make the network more cost-effective and increase its efficacy, and it will probably be activated sometime before the Devcon4 conference to be held in October, as indicated by stakeholders in a core developer meeting on 27th July.

However, the developers have not yet finalized the block number in which the code would go live. This change is backward-incompatible and has been given a sketchy roadmap to go forward with. According to it, implementation will go on till 13th August, followed by 2 months’ testing, and the launch of a test network dedicated to Constantinople.

Several optimizations to boost platform efficiency are expected to be a part of this upgrade, with lower fees. The predecessor of this upgrade was Byzantium, which saw activation in October 2017.

The core developer meeting indicated that four improvement upgrades for Ethereum are being implemented presently. Geth (most well-known client of Ethereum) lead developer Péter  Szilágyi claimed that they were done with implementation of most changes.

Upgrades such as the EIP 210 that reorganizes Ethereum’s block hash storage, are already in the implementation stage. EIP 145 for arithmetic speed increment, EIP 1014 for adding state channels and EIP 1052 for compressing interaction between contracts are also a work in progress.

Developers are still yet to discuss and decide on some key changes such as delaying the difficulty bomb of Ethereum and developing an EIP to enhance the functioning of gas pricing.

No decision has been taken with regard to mining difficulty, which would require them to consider the issuance model of Ethereum and the varying effects on the different stakeholders. Moderator Hudson Jameson concluded the discussion by noting that the decision was pending on the issue. Industry insiders are looking forward to a decision being taken on these various contentious issues that are yet to be resolved, so that the implementation process can go on smoothly as planned.