Constantinople Incoming: Tomorrow's Two Ethereum Hard Forks Explained

Known as Constantinople and St. Petersburg, both upgrades will be implemented as "Hard forks," or upgrades that add new rules to the ethereum software that are incompatible with past versions.

Further, four out of five planned ethereum improvement proposals - the majority of which, according to independent ethereum developer Lane Rettig, will not be noticeable to the average user.

Calling Constantinople primarily a "Maintenance and optimization upgrade" in an interview with CoinDesk, Rettig highlighted in September that the only user group to experience a noticeable change would be miners, the specialized hardware operators who today assemble ethereum transactions into blocks and compete for network rewards.

"Adding Bitwise shifting instructions will make it slightly cheaper to conduct certain functions on chain. This is a step in the right direction to making developing on ethereum more cost-effective for developers."

Once activated, users can monitor the progress of both hard forks in real time using a developer tool known as the "Fork monitor," which visualizes ethereum blockchain data into a time series graph.

As much as the ethereum community is hopeful the upgrade will go over smoothly, one can never really be too sure when it comes to hard forks.

This is notable as ever since testing for the upgrade began as early back as July 2018, ethereum developers have faced multiple roadblocks causing delays to the activation of Constantinople.

February 12, 2019 - Final software releases of Constantinople and St. Petersburg from major ethereum clients such as Geth and Parity are released and later compiled into a comprehensive blog post on the official ethereum website.

"I'm eager to put Constantinople behind us because it's been such a distraction for a lot of core developers, the community, [and] the entire ecosystem. What we need to be focusing on right now is the path forward for ethereum."

These milestones according to Rettig include first and foremost, a proposed code change to alter the ethereum mining algorithm such that all miners in the ecosystem are operating on a more level playing field.