Constantinople, the planned upgrade of the Ethereum blockchain was successfully activated on the network on Thursday, Feb. 28 at 19:57 (UTC).
The upgrade was implemented on block 7,280,000 as scheduled by ethereum core developers after notable delays.
According to data provided by Ethernodes.org, only about 28 percent of the ethereum client nodes are ready for the Constantinople fork at the time of writing. This comes down to:
1733 of 7026 total Geth nodes or 24.7% of Geth nodes and
1371 of 3227 total Parity nodes or 42.5% of Parity nodes
Data from Fork monitor shows that no new blocks are being mined on the old non-Constantinople chain which indicates the hardfork was successful.
The Constantinople, which is the sixth planned upgrade of the Ethereum blockchain was followed by another upgrade dubbed the St. Petersburg upgrade which makes it a double upgrade. St. Petersburg was developed to remove an Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) which contained vulnerability from Constantinople. The EIP 1283 was found to have a critical smart contract security bugs which led to the last delay in the Constantinople upgrade.
With the upgrade, the ethereum blockchain will witness improvements in efficiency. The EIPs included in the upgrade will reduce the block rewards from 3 ETH to 2 ETH while also reducing transactions fees for some operations on the network.
This is expected to be the last major upgrade before the Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm is implemented on Ethereum. As such, it contained codes that will ease the transition from the current Proof of Work (PoW) to a PoS era.
The upgrade effectively resets the difficulty bomb which is programmed into the ethereum code to encourage frequent upgrades.
Major exchanges including Binance, Huobi, OKEx, Coinbase, and Kraken have all confirmed support for the ethereum upgrade long before the launch.
| Name | Price | 24H % |
|---|---|---|
 | $0.00 | -2.08% |
Ethereum (ETH) Price Watch
The successful hardfork has failed to spur the price of Ether since it went live. According to CoinmarketCap, ETH is trading at $136 about 1 percent from this time yesterday. It went only as high as $139 yesterday but has since dropped. The trading volume is about $4.11 million in the last 24 hours, nothing out of the extraordinary.
Riccardo Lopp is a writer specializing in Crypto, ethereum and whole blockchain ecosystem. His background is in economics and statistics.
