Back in October, Ethereum corde development team unveiled the Constantinople blockchain upgrade on the Ropsten testnet of the Ethereum network. The developers trusted that the upgrade would minimize block rewards and divert ASICs and so planned to deploy it in the mainnet by the end of October.
However, the upgrade was postponed due to issues related to consensus. At that time, the developers decided to tentatively postpone the network upgrade to mid-January. Now, during the recent Core Developer meeting, it was decided to move forward with the January blockchain upgrade.
On the basis of Eth block time of 14.3 sec and remaining blocks of 234,400, the Constantinople upgrade is expected in nearly 38 days from today. This implies the network upgrade is expected to happen sometime around January 14, 2019, according to the information available on Etherscan, the Ethereum blockchain explorer.
Overall, the will be five different Ethereum Improvement Proposals in the Constantinople hard fork, aimed to smoothly conduct the transition from proof-of-work (PoW) consensus protocol to proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus algorithm, which is energy efficient. Ethereum blockchain, launched in 2015, is a public, open-sourced blockchain platform facilitating the deployment of smart contracts. The network’s native cryptocurrency is called Ether (ETH).
The blockchain network’s Co-Founder, Vitalik Buterin was recently felicitated with a doctorate by the University of Basel, Switzerland’s oldest university. The honor was given for “outstanding achievements in fields of cryptocurrencies, smart contracts, and the design of institutions.”
The value of Ether has declined considerably in the past month due to the ongoing crypto rout. The cryptocurrency is trading at about $86.7 and has a market cap of about $9.13 billion.