Ethereum hard forks Constantinople and St. Petersburg scheduled by the end of the week

The long awaited Ethereum hard fork – Constantinople will finally come to be by the end of this week. The good news is that another long awaited network improvement – the St. Petersburg hard fork is also scheduled on the same date. The information was revealed by an official Ethereum blog post from last Friday.

Ethereum developers have chosen the 7,280,000^th Ethereum block for the updates to happen. It is expected that the 7,280,000^th block will be mined around February 28th. Both hard forks are unique by their nature and an original concept, but they will be combined into one single event. The Constantinople hard fork was delayed multiple times, because Ethereum developers wanted everything to go smoothly and to prevent possible security issues.

Both hard forks will improve the Ethereum network’s overall efficiency, they will delay Ethereum’s difficulty bomb, decrease Ethereum’s mining rewards and more. I recently wrote about Ethereum mining rewards. Etherscan released data showed that mining rewards are at their lowest level since the beginning.

Ethereum is preparing to upgrade

Developers implemented the Ethereum difficulty bomb as a mechanism to the consensus algorithm meant to prevent miners from mining the network after its transition from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake. The implementation of Proof-of-Stake (PoS) however was delayed multiple times so Ethereum developers decided to delay the difficulty bomb so they don’t freeze the entire network, before the PoS transition.

The Constantinople hard fork is delaying the difficulty bomb for 12 months, but to compensate this they are implementing a reduction the mining rewards from 3 ETH to 2 ETH per block. Another function that will be implemented is the Create2 function, which was rumored to introduce attack vectors to Ethereum, but Ethereum CEO Vitalik Buterin dismissed these rumors.

St. Petersburg will delete and overwrite a previous Ethereum update – the Ethereum Improvement Proposal 1283 from the test networks. Nearly all big exchanges confirmed their support for the hard forks. The latest exchanges to join the list were Kraken and Coinbase, joining Binance, OKEx and Huobi.

Ethereum has experienced an increase in trading volume lately, as you can see in the graph above. Ethereum price also increased from $103 to $165 recently, but conceding to the latest pump and dump. Still Ethereum is in a great spot at the moment, with most experts saying that the next big Crypto bull run will be remembered.

Read more:

• Ethereum founder and CEO, Vitalik Buterin revealed his non-Ethereum holdings and revenue
• Ethereum Mining rewards down to their lowest level since the beginning
• Elon Musk: Bitcoin’s structure is quite brilliant and a better way to store value than paper money
• NEO founder speaks about the best Blockchains and Digital Currencies for 2020