An important hard fork of the Ethereum network called Constantinople, which is the second phase of the implementation of the Byzantium update, will be launched on October 30. As the developers note, Constantinople will increase efficiency and reduce transaction fees in the network Ethereum.

Constantinople should lead to a higher level of scalability of the Ethereum network before sharding and Casper are gradually introduced.

The Constantinople hard fork is one of two steps aimed at smoothing the transition from the consensus PoW algorithm to PoS. Peter Siladzhi, the leading developer of the most popular Ether client Geth, said that most of the necessary changes have already been implemented.

In particular, we are talking about the EIP 210, which reorganizes the storage of block hashes, and EIP 145, which increases the speed of arithmetic operations in the Ethereum virtual machine (EVM). Work is also underway on EIP 1014, responsible for the addition of state channels, and EIP 1052, a new opcode that helps compress the amount of data in the interaction of contracts.

The developers also said that they are trying to avoid disagreements, such as those that led to the appearance of Ethereum Classic in 2016. That hard fork occurred after the breaking of the Ethereum network, which cost users $ 50 million and showed that the network lacks security measures. However, since then the Ethereum has come a long way.