Ethereum's Constantinople, St. Petersburg Upgrades Set to Occur This Week

Ethereum's next two network upgrades, referred to as Constantinople and St. Petersburg, are scheduled to take place this week, according to an official Ethereum blog post on Feb. 22.

More precisely, the updates are scheduled to happen at Ethereum's block 7,280,000, which is expected to be mined on Feb. 28.

Constantinople will bring the platform multiple efficiency improvements, as well as the delay of the so-called "Difficulty bomb" and the decrease of Ethereum's block reward.

The difficulty bomb is a feature meant to prevent miners from continuing their activity on the chain after Ethereum's switch to a Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm.

Since PoS implementation continues to be postponed, Ethereum developers had to delay the difficulty bomb to "Make sure we don't freeze the blockchain before proof of stake is ready & implemented."

To compensate for the easier mining process, Constantinople will also feature the so-called "Thirdening": a reduction of the reward for every miner block from 3 to 2 ETH. Constantinople also brings the Create2 function to the platform, which was at first rumored to introduce an attack vector to Ethereum.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin later dismissed the concerns.

The other network update, St. Petersburg, is meant to delete a previous update, Ethereum Improvement Proposal 1283, from Ethereum's test networks.

In January, major United States cryptocurrency exchanges Coinbase and Kraken became the latest to confirm support for Ethereum's upgrade.

As Cointelegraph recently reported, new Ethereum being generated through mining is seeing its lowest levels ever, Etherscan data reveals.