A previous report made it known that the Ethereum Constantinople upgrade which was originally scheduled to take place in November has been shifted to next year. In light of this, two dates are currently being considered for the implementation of this upgrade.

Minutes from the Ethereum Core Developer Meeting

At a recent Ethereum core developer meeting, two dates were proposed for the implementation of the Constantinople upgrade. The first one was the 16th January and the second was the 12th.

Going by the two dates, it is clear that the core-developers want the hard fork to take place in mid-January after the holiday season.

The minute report also confirmed this. It was stated therein that January 16th is the most preferred date by the majority of developer present at the meeting.

A core developer further gave his own opinion about the two dates. The developer also suggested other dates he thinks the upgrade could be made.

He stated that:

“If this is a viable option (can’t completely judge the overall effort needed to get this in place + communicate this), I would like to make the following adopted timeline suggestion:

December 10th (Monday), 2018:

Start of a new PoW testnet, deprecate Ropsten

January 16th (Wednesday), 2019:

Fork on the new testnet

February 12th (Tuesday), 2019:

Fork on mainnet

Expectations

The initial delay in the Constantinople upgrade has been traced to the fact that some bugs were noticed in a code that was released on a test network.

If successful the upgrade is expected to introduce five Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIP) which are:

1.EIP 1283: proposes the reduction of excessive gas costs where it does not match how the most implementation works

2.EIP 1014: to implement scaling based upon state channels and off-chain transactions

3.EIP 145: Introduces Native bitwise shifting instructions which are more efficient for processing transactions on the network

4.EIP 1218: Allows blocks to be directly aware of block hashes much older than the current hash

5. EIP 1052: optimizes large-scale code execution on the network