You might be familiar with the crypto term “Hardfork” it’s a term used to describe an upgrade or change on a system or technology in the crypto space. Technically a change forces certain divergences in the blockchain, as a result of miner or user activity or a change in rules.

Constantinople in history was the capital city of the Roman/Byzantine Empire, and also of the brief Crusader state known as the Latin Empire, until finally falling to the Ottoman Empire. Actually it is the name of the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire after the Roman empire split. Ultimately that split led to a total collapse of the Roman Empire.

Is Constantinople now threatening to split the Ethereum empire ?, time will tell.

However, Constantinople here is an upcoming upgrade on the ethereum blockchain a hard fork which is said to include a feature that may prove to be a usability game-changer and more. It has been scheduled to be released on Wednesday Jan. 16, it is ethereum’s fifth planned system-wide upgrade which will occur at block 7,080,000.

One of the things to expert on this day is the inherent risk, if a sufficient number of users don’t agree with an upgrade, it could cause the network to split. An example can be sighted in 2016 when a controversial hard fork following the collapse of the DAO led to the emergence of two distinct blockchains, ethereum and ethereum classic.

In a recent tweet by Afri Schoedon, hardfork coordinator at ethereum and release manager at paritytech ethereum client, he tweeted that the risk of chain split is low because adoption of the upgrade by ethereum’s top mining pools. He further wrote in his tweets that miners are prepared and only miners can split the chain.

https://twitter.com/5chdn/status/1084154862554750976

Although a tracking website operated by Peter Pratscher, the CEO of top ether mining pool Ethermine, tracks Constantinople adoption to be a mere 15.6 percent. In an interview with CoinDesk, Pratscher said that the statistics are flawed, and claimed the adoption to be closer to a majority.

In his words he said “We expect most of the not-updated nodes to be updated by the time the fork block arrives,”.

Constantinople will implement CREATE2 which was originally conceived by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin as far back as 2014 , it’s been introduced as a key component of Ethereum’s January 16 mainet upgrade.

CREATE2 will allow developers to create smart contract addresses without actually having to deploy the contract, enabling users to transact off-chain. CREATE2 is capable of resolving all sorts of problems on the ethereum blockchain including the issue of onboarding which has been a poor experience for some current and potential ethereum dapp users.

In the past users have to go through metamask and other similar platforms, input their private keys before they can use some Dapps, with the new development users don’t need keys to perform transactions.

Some of the major things to expect

Operation off chain: EIP 1014 is a keystone for the state channel framework of off-chain work, it will allow future contract to be counter factually instantiated, this means that parties on and off the blockchain can act as though it already has been deployed, and complete substantial work beforehand and then sign and verify said work using an on-chain multi-signature wallet.

Technology based on trust: The new technology will operate based on trust, it will allow interactions with contract addresses that don’t exist on-chain yet.

Minimization of on-chain operations: It will minimize on-chain operations to those necessary for validating the cooperative effort/communications and not performing unnecessary calculations on the blockchain itself.

Experimentation is on, Developers, who have waited patiently for this are now experimenting on the testnet. This new tech should bring about a better Ethereum Dapp User experience.