A hardfork took place on the Ethereum blockchain with activation of the Constantinople

update.

Constantinople and St. Petersburg Updates Petersburg was successfully activated in the network of the second largest cryptocurrency Ethereum on the block 7 280 000, it happened 02.02.2019 at 22:57 Moscow time according to the previously designated plan .

According to the Ethernodes portal, only 19.9% of users of Geth clients and 32.6% of Parity installed a version of the software compatible with Constantinople. Overall readiness for hard fork was 22.1%.

It is expected that the block time will return to 15 seconds, after rising to 20 seconds as a result of the activation of the bomb complexity. Along with the update, the block reward decreased from 3 ETH to 2 ETH, however, the issue of cryptocurrency relative to the last weeks, when miners could not receive the maximum rewards due to increased complexity, increased.

As noted by Trustnodes , the update passed without incident. The clients of Geth and Parity of the current version were successfully synchronized, with which the ETH miners , node operators and business representatives found themselves in a new network.

3 minutes before the fork, the portal for tracking its passage stopped functioning, however, no such problems were noticed in the network itself.

Simultaneously with Constantinople another update took place – St. Petersburg, which allowed to disable part of the original fork code, which contained bugs.

Now miners will mine about 7,000 ETH per day, and developers will have access to improved network capabilities. The next step is testnet Beacon Chain, which should be launched in March.

That's a wrap! Constantinople and St. Petersburg fork complete for the @ethereum #blockchain network upgrade! ?? pic.twitter.com/SDtfm3vgvT

– Amberdata.io (@Amberdataio) February 28, 2019

Constantinople is the second stage of Metropolis hardforka (the first is Byzantium , which lowered the unit award from 5 to 3 ETH). Other changes in the Ethereum network include:

• EIP 145 – improving the efficiency and speed of the blockchain by adding Bitwise switching mechanisms to the Ethereum virtual machine;
• EIP 1052 – Improving network usability for developing smart contracts and simplifying certain operations in Ethereum code.

Among other things, the update optimizes the use of gas in the network and creates the conditions for the activation of the Casper protocol, which will translate Ethereum to a hybrid PoW / PoS consensus algorithm .

Note that the activation of Constantinople was to be held last fall, but each time before the update of the protocol, the developers found different bugs. The final activation date was agreed on January 18th.

Also recall that two weeks before the hardfork Constantinople was discovered a vulnerability , affecting some smart contracts with the possibility of self-destruction.

Publication date 03/03/2019
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