Fans and investors of Ethereum (ETH) have something to look forward to as we head into the Holiday season. This is due to the fact that during an Ethereum core developer meeting held this past Friday, a new timeline was proposed to implement the Constantinople upgrade.

In the minutes of the meeting currently available on GitHub, two dates were suggested in January 2019. The first one was the 16th January and the second was the 12th.

January 16th Date

Many of the core-developers agreed that the hard fork should happen in mid-January after the Holiday season. January 16th was the date prefered most by the Ethereum core developers. One core developer had this to say about the timeline.

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

About Constantinople

The upgrade on the Ethereum network is one of the largest to date. If successful, Constantinople will introduce five Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIP) as follows.

EIP 145: Introduces Native bitwise shifting instructions which are more efficient for processing transactions on the network EIP 1218: Allows blocks to be directly aware of block hashes much older than the current hash EIP 1014: to implement scaling based upon state channels and off-chain transactions EIP 1052: optimizes large-scale code execution on the network EIP 1283: proposes the reduction of excessive gas costs where it does not match how most implementation works

Market Reaction and the Future of ETH

With the announcement of a possible date for the Constantinople hard fork, investors and traders can once again get excited about ETH in the markets. Ethereum is currently trading at $211 and down less than a percentage point in the last 24 hours. As more investors get wind of the possibility of an early 2019 upgrade, we could see an increase in value for the King of Smart Contracts: also known as Ethereum.

What are your thoughts on the Ethereum upgrade known as Constantinople? Please let us know in the comment section below.

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