Ethereum’s next big upgrade, called Constantinople is coming soon.
The upgrade was finalized on August 31 an includes 5 EIPs (Ethereum Improvement Proposals).
Once released, these proposals will permanently modify the blockchain. There will be a number of backward-incompatible upgrades to the system.
The New Upgrade
The nodes running the Ethereum software can upgrade to the new version, moving along with the new system. Alternatively, it can run as a separate entity.
Hard forks such as this are system-wide upgrades. What’s more, such hard forks often result in separations within communities where some users are not willing to accept the changes.
However, many of the Constantinople upgrades will not be noticeable to the general users. Lane Rettig, an independent developer said that the hard fork will not have any “big changes” for the average end user at all.
Rettig calls Constantinople a “maintenance and optimization upgrade”. There will be small yet important improvements to the efficiency of the network and the fee structure.
The upgrade will also modify the economic policy on which Ethereum is based. Eric Conner, an Ethereum trader said, “Complex coding and testing takes time. And Ethereum is live so it’s essential to be sure no changes are breaking.”
Amongst the 5 EIPs are EIP 145, 1052, 1014, 1283, and 1234. In a nutshell, the optimizations aim to improve the processing times for developers. They also aim to implement fair pricing structures for the changes to smart contract data storage. The company plan further modifications to the code in order to make scaling easier.
The Future
Many of the members of Ethereum’s mining community disapprove of the decision to reduce the mining rewards. This will lead to reduced profit margins and increased centralization of the mining operations.
These points are raised at a time when ASICs are widely used on this platform.
Nick Johnson is a core Ethereum developer. He says, “anyone can contribute tests” to a global test suite which will be run against all the client implementations later.
This software is set to be released October 8th. However, the grand premiere of the hard fork might come into effect later in the month or in November.