By
Steve Muchoki
April 17th, 2024
In less than 12 hours, Constantinople and St. Petersburg hard forks will go live. But before any network upgrades are applied to the main network, they take place on test networks, such as Ropsten.
In less than 24 hours, the world will see the upgrade of Ethereum, the second largest token by market capitalization. As Etherscan’s countdown timer shows, the upcoming Ethereum Constantinople and St. Petersburg Upgrade will take place at approximately 20:08:59 UTC.
The long-awaited Constantinople and St. Petersburg upgrades will be a major amendment to the Ethereum network, as many significant changes will be brought to the platform, improving its efficiency. The major alterations will affect such important things as the network’s core protocol specifications, contract standards, and client APIs.
Constantinople and St. Petersburg hard forks will reduce block reward issuance from 3 to 2 ETH, similar to how the previous hard fork – called Byzantium – reduced issuance from 5 to 3 ETH. Both the hard forks have been agreed to launch on Ethereum block number 7,280,000.
Initially, it was the Constantinople hard fork that was surrounded by hot discussions. Its launch was twice postponed because of critical security vulnerability. The first delay was made in October last year when numerous bugs were found in the code released on the Ropsten testnet. In January, the hard fork was held off again.
As we reported earlier, a loophole in the Constantinople hard fork software was found, which could lead to attackers exploiting this and withdrawing users’ funds through a reentrancy attack. After that, the developers decided to make sure the entire network gets onboard as per the plan and implement a two-fork strategy.
Now the world is waiting for both Constantinople and St. Petersburg hard forks, which will occur in less than 12 hours. But before any network upgrades are applied to the main network, they take place on test networks, such as Ropsten.
Binance to Support the Ethereum Upgrade
The upcoming hard forks have already been backed by some prominent players of the crypto industry. Recently, Binance, one of the world’s fastest growing and most popular cryptocurrency exchanges, has announced it will be supporting the Ethereum upgrade.
#Binance Will Support the Upcoming Ethereum Constantinople/St. Petersburg Upgradehttps://t.co/rXVa5bRP5n pic.twitter.com/ZshT98XuSA
— Binance (@binance) February 27, 2019
As Binance said, users should “leave sufficient time for deposits to be processed in full prior to the block height shown above”. All the technical requirements will be handled by Binance, that’s why users of cold storage wallets and major crypto exchanges are required to do anything for the upgrade.
How Will The Upgrade Influence Ethereum Price?
Amid the hard forks, volatility of Ethereum price has increased, which is mostly because of the unwillingness of traders to invest on the threshold of the change to the underlying Ethereum protocol.
The overall bearish situation on the market has also taken its role. On Sunday, Ethereum reached its three-month high, and a couple of hours later, dropped 17 percent and witnessed a considerable sell-off.
If the Constantinople fork resembles what was in Ethereum markets after the Byzantium fork, its prices should not exceed a drop beyond 20 percent. Then, it took 34 days for Ethereum’s price to break above the sideways channel after the fork took place. There will be no surprise if after the new upgrade the coin will sideways trend for several weeks.
At the moment of writing, Ethereum makes up $137.39 per token.