The Ethereum developer community came together and reached an agreement to apply the Constantinople hard fork to the Ethereum Ropsten testnet from block 4,200,000. The objective of applying this update in a test network is to minimize the possible risks associated with this type of fork.
The agreement was unanimous, and the proposal was accepted without any hitches. Thus, the tentative date of application of the hard fork or hardfork would be October 9 taking into account the current block generation speed. The fork will also be made in Kovan, from block 9.200.00.
The meeting was moderated by Jameson Hudson and co-creator of Ethereum, the Russian Vitalik Buterin, participated in it, although he did not give any additional information. The developers met last September 28th.
Let’s remember that EIP 1013, Constantinople, created on April 20, 2017 by Nick Savers, will allow for the transition of the Ethereum network consensus from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake. The beginning of Constantinople marks the end of the first phase of Metropolis, a planned hardfork for the development of the network.
Constantinople will be activated first in the test network and then in the main crypto network.
This update will help the network to solve its scalability problems, according to its own developers, lowering the fees for the transactions made in it by increasing the efficiency of the chain and the use of space in its blocks.
In addition, they discussed the status of ProgPoW, a working test algorithm designed to “close the efficiency gap available to specialized ASICs. The goal is to extend the lifespan of mining equipment. According to Kristy-Leigh Minehan, the code is ready.
However, he assured that until the community demonstrates a real interest in implementing the algorithm, they will not move forward in its deployment throughout the network, since it involves a considerable investment that might not be included in the implementation of the hard fork. “Until then I don’t think it’s worth wasting work hours or money on a project that could be ignored,” he said during the meeting.
In a meeting this year, the team of developers decided to reduce ETH issuance and delay the enforcement of the difficulty bomb on the network, in an effort to revalue the crypto currencies, in the middle of an extremely difficult year for ETH, especially in terms of falling price.