Ethereum's Hard Fork Constantinople: What You Need to Know Before January 16th

The long-planned Ethereum fork is coming on Jan. 16th. With Constantinople going live within weeks, here's what is important to know.

Constantinople is one of the key milestones in Ethereum's roadmap to version 2.0, which moves the protocol from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake.

Once activated, nodes running Constantinople will be incompatible with the previous version of Ethereum, resulting in a "Hard fork" of the blockchain.

Ethereum team lead Péter Szilágyi predicts that the protocol will fork on Jan. 16th, when the blockchain reaches block 7,080,000.

Ethereum Constantinople mainnet hard fork scheduled for block #7080000, estimated around the 16th of January, 2019!

Once the hard fork is activated, nodes running the latest software will operate on the new fork.

Unlike hard forks that yield two different cryptocurrencies, this hard fork is considered "Non-contentious," meaning that the community is likely to adopt the upgrade.

The latest versions of all major Ethereum clients are already patched for the upgrade, and the core developer team, at their Jan. 4th meeting, expressed confidence in the scheduled release.

Constantinople addresses five different Ethereum Improvement Proposals.

It's still too soon to predict how changes in Ethereum mining rewards will impact the ether economy.