Ethereum’s upcoming hard fork, Constantinople, will be released in a testing environment during the second week in October according to developer.

Two months ago, Toshi Times covered the story that the Ethereum started to do testing the new hard fork and upgrade, Constantinople. The upgrade should lead to increased efficiency and lower fees across the network. The Constantinople upgrade is the second phase of upgrades for the Ethereum network, which is following on from the Byzantium phase, activated last October. It will make some optimizations which rather notably, will lower transaction fees.

Constantinople includes five different Ethereum improvement proposals (EIPs). Once released on Ethereum, the proposals will permanently alter the blockchain with a host of new backwards-incompatible upgrades. It means that nodes, the network of computers, that run the Ethereum software must either update together with the whole system or continue running as a separate blockchain entity. Characterized as primarily a “maintenance and optimization upgrade” by Rettig, Constantinople features small, yet highly technical.

October is soon upon us, and recent news states that Constantinople is coming to the Ropsten testnet around the second week of October. A testnet behaves very similarly to the real net. Ropsten is the testnet that is the most similar to Ethereum’s net and uses proof-of-work. The public and private keys for Ethereum works on the testnet as well. Be sure not to send real Ethereum to the testnet since it will be lost forever.

Even though they are about to test if everything works in October, the date for the real launch has not been released. The developer Afri Schoedon states that he is waiting for a core developer to finalize the block number.

“Both hard forks will be around mid-October. putting it on ice for discussion, waiting for the core developers to finalize the block number”.

However, due to the unpredictability of block confirmation times in the testing environment, an exact block number for the testnet activation has yet to be finalized.

Ethereum is one of the most famous cryptocurrencies and is according to Coinmarketcap the second biggest by market capitalization. Even though it is the second biggest, it has dropped tremendously in value. Ethereums value has dropped 85% since the all-time high in December. The fundamentals even look better than ever, not least with the new hard fork, and even Google has recently announced that they will add Ethereums blockchain dataset to its massive platform.

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