Ethereum’s Next Upgrades to Occur This Week

According to an official blog post, the two network upgrades for Ethereum, codenamed St. Petersburg and Constantinople, are due to take place this week. This upgrade is to occur at block 7,280,000 on Ethereum’s Blockchain. This block is expected to be mined on February 28 – the last day of the month. However, considering the unpredictability involved in mining, the actual implementation of the upgrade could take place earlier or later than schedule, give or take a couple of days.

According to Ethereum’s blog post, the two upgrades were named St. Petersburg and Constantinople to represent two upgrades. The original plan had been to have two distinct upgrades, however, now, these two upgrades will take place at the same time. This is because the Constantinople upgrade had to be delayed due to the discovery of a security vulnerability.

The Constantinople Upgrade

The upgrade Constantinople is expected improve multiple efficiencies on the Ethereum platform, and also push back the difficulty bomb. The difficulty bomb is a section of code that steadily pushes up the difficulty of mining new blocks on Ethereum’s chain.

The main purpose of the difficulty bomb is to stop miners from carrying out activities on the Blockchain after Ethereum switches to the new consensus algorithm, Proof-of-Stake (PoS). However, since the PoS implementation has been postponed a number of times, the developers at Ethereum have had to delay the implementation of the difficulty bomb.

According to the developers, this has been done so that the Blockchain is not frozen before the PoS is implemented.

Therefore, the Constantinople upgrade is going to delay the difficulty bomb once more for another 12 months.

Added to that, this new upgrade is expected to also decrease the reward gained from mining each of Ethereum’s blocks. To make up for the easier mining process, the Constantinople upgrade will introduce thirdening. This is the reduction of the reward for every mined Block from 3ETH to 2ETH.

Finally, the Constantinople upgrade will also bring the Create2 function to the Ethereum platform.

The St. Petersburg Upgrade

This is a relatively minor upgrade as compared to the Constantinople upgrade.

This is being done because there had been several accidental forks because of confusion caused by the hard fork that was scheduled to occur but then was cancelled, leading to some changes that did not really help the network.

The St. Petersburg upgrade is expected to delete a previous update on the Ethereum Blockchain, called the Improvement Proposal 1283, from the Blockchain’s test networks.

Cryptocurrency exchanges such as Binance, OKEx, Huobi, Coinbase and Kraken have all pledged their support for the upcoming hard fork in the Ethereum network.