It’s not long now until we get to see the Constantinople and St. Petersburg hard forks go live on the Ethereum network. Before any network upgrades are applied to the primary network, they will take place on test networks like Ropsten.

The upcoming Constantinople hard fork has been anticipated for a long time now after it was delayed last month due to a vulnerability being found on one of the updated blocks. Both of the new updates will be launching on the Ethereum block number of 7,280,000.

The two changes will be massive for the Ethereum network. Many significant changes will be brought to the platform and help improve its efficiency. Some of the bigger changes will affect important things like the network’s core protocol specifications, client APIs, contract standards and so on.

Both of the hard fork upgrades will reduce block reward issuance from 3 to 2 ETH. This isn’t too different from the previous hard fork, dubbed as Byzantium, which reduced issuance from 5 to 2 ETH.

The whole cryptocurrency community is awaiting both the Constantinople and St. Petersburg hard forks, which will occur later today. As previously mentioned, before the updates get applied to the main network, they will be taking place on the test network such as Ropsten.

The upcoming hard fork has been backed by quite a few key crypto players such as the Binance exchange who recently took to Twitter saying that they are going to be supporting the new hard forks:

Price

One thing that some people have been wondering is how the upgrades will impact the price of Ethereum. During hard forks, the volatility of Ethereum will increase, this is mainly because of the unwillingness of traders to invest in the threshold of the change to the underlying Ethereum protocol.

It isn’t long now until the Constantinople hard fork goes live. You can head to Etherscan for the countdown timer which is currently under 9 hours at the current time of writing.