Ethereum developers have started testing the code for Constantinople, the network’s next major system upgrade. Constantinople is considered as the second part of a series of upgrades planned to make the Ethereum network more efficient and cheaper in terms of fees.
According to the Ethereum developer team, Constantinople is planned to be activated sometime before October’s Devcon4 Ethereum conference.
However, the developer team has not revealed the precise block number at which the code would get activated for the irreconcilable change.
According to the rough estimate, the implementation will happen until August 13. This will be followed by two months of testing and the launch of Constantinople-specific test network. Several optimizations will be performed while upgrading the network, in order to improve the efficiency of the platform. The previous upgrade of the Ethereum network, Byzantium, was done in October.
According to the details revealed in the developer meeting, a total of four Ethereum Improvement Upgrades (EIPs) are presently being implemented.
Lead developer of Geth, Péter Szilágyi, revealed that most of the changes have already been implemented. During the meeting, Szilágyi said “The EIPs are mostly done.”
Other crucial upgrades that have reached the stage of implementation include include EIP 210, which rearranges the manner in which block hashes are stored on Ethereum, and EIP 145, which boosts the arithmetic speed in the Ethereum virtual machine (EVM).
Two other important upgrades, EIP 1052, a new op-code that constricts the interaction of contracts and EIP 1014 for adding Ethereum state channels, are being worked by developers.
Final decision on implementing a delay in Ethereum’s difficulty bomb and a EIP to fine tune gas pricing are yet to be made. These two upgrades are yet to be discussed thoroughly.
