According to the latest update from Ethereum’s core developers, the Constantinople hard fork that everyone has been waiting for will finally be released in mid-january. The hard fork will be at block 7,080,000. The decision was made in the bi-weekly developers meeting on December 7th. This news comes just after the news about the Constantinople fork was delayed to late January 2019 because of a lack of consensus.
Ethereum Constantinople Hard Fork
The ETH block time is about 14.3 seconds and there are about 234,431 blocks left. This means that the long-awaited upgrade will become active in the next 38 days. Counting from today, this puts the date for the upgrade around January 14 next year. This is according to the data from Etherscan, the Ethereum blockchain explorer.
Ethereum (ETH) Price Today – BTC / USD
| Name | Price | 24H % |
|---|---|---|
 | $0.00 | -2.08% |
With the hard fork, the Ethereum blockchain will have five different Ethereum Improvements Proposals (EIPs) to soften the blockchain transaction to proof-of-stake from proof-of-work. The proof-of-sake is a more efficient Ethereum algorithm that will make the network faster and easier to use. As soon as it is activated, the entire Ethereum blockchain will change fundamentally and the synchronous nodes will be updated to the system.
Buterin Gets Honorary Doctorate
Not too long ago, Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum got an honorary doctorate from the University of Basel. The University of Basel is oldest university in Switzerland and it granted Buterin this honor for his outstanding contributions to design of institutions, smart contracts, and cryptocurrencies.
Last month, some analysts from the University of Maryland and Northeastern University claimed that the lack of diversity in Ethereum smart contracts is a threat to the entire blockchain. According to them, a more diverse environment is needed for smart contracts for the system to be more efficient.
Ethereum (ETH) Price Analysis
Ethereum is one of the cryptocurrencies that suffered the most during this price decline. It even lost its position as the second largest cryptocurrency per market capitalization. As the third largest cryptocurrency per market capitalization, ETH is currently trading at $90.12. This shows that it is up by 5.24% against the USD and up by 4.93%. However, this is the lowest low it has gone this year alone. The trading volume is $2,112,260,111 and the market capitalization is $9,343,138,582.
