Ethereum Metropolis — from cryptocanucks.com

If you follow Ethereum and the blockchain echosystem you will know that as of yesterday, October 16th 2017, Ethereum has been updated to Byzantium.

Byzantium is the first of the two Metropolis updates. The second, Constantinople will follow.

What are the new features brought by Metropolis?

It is beyond the scope of the article to dig the technological details of Metropolis and I would recommend looking at the Accepted EIPs for Byzantium. However, in short:

Reduction in mining reward (from 5 ETH to 3ETH).

Preparation for private transactions (functions to support the implementation of zk-snarks)

Faster transaction processing

Smart contracts improvements

The day after the fork

More than 24 hours since the fork, it is already clear that the changes brought by Byzantium have had a positive impact on the network. Let’s have a look at some of the stats.

Ethereum Average BlockTime time

Snapshot as of 11.45 AM UTC — Oct 17th — 2017 from https://etherscan.io/chart/blocktime

Average block time for October 16th has been 18.71 seconds which is a great improvement over the ~30 seconds of the previous days. Blocks are mined nearly 40% faster. If this sounds great, you should read what Vitalik Buterin has to say on the matter:

Block time will be 14 seconds. This means faster transactions that will benefit the entire echosystem, from traders to dApp developers and dApp users.

Ethereum Pending Transactions Queue

Snapshot as of 11.45 AM UTC — Oct 17th — 2017 from https://etherscan.io/chart/pendingtx

We already mentioned above that one of the features of Byzantium would be a faster network, how does that translate into numbers?

The pending transactions queue shows it clearly, for most of the time after the upgrade pending transactions have been below 100.

A less congested network means that users can now try to perform their transactions using a lower GAS value, or, in other words, it is currently very cheap to execute transactions on the Ethereum network.

Ethereum Pending Transactions Queue

Snapshot as of 11.45 AM UTC — Oct 17th — 2017 from https://etherscan.io/chart/gasprice

As direct consequence of a non-congested network, the Gas price in WEI has been significantly lower after the fork, in fact, it is ~30% lower compared to the days before the fork.

Ethereum daily block rewards

Snapshot as of 11.45 AM UTC — Oct 17th — 2017 from https://etherscan.io/chart/gasprice

You might be wondering, rightfully so, why the daily block reward graph shows an increase after the fork. We’ve introduced the article by saying the block issuance was reduced from 5ETH to 3 ETH per block, however considered that the block time has reduced greatly, this means that the overall daily rewards has actually gone up.

Metropolis has a solid ground to become a success for Ethereum

The Ethereum Dev team has put together a first massive update to the protocol with Byzantium and with the second part Constaninople the future of Ethereum is as bright as ever.

Congratulations to the team for working so hard to achieve such a smooth and successful fork.