Constantinople Ahead: What You Need to Know About Ethereum's Big Upgrade

Finalized August 31, Constantinople includes five different ethereum improvement proposals.

Characterized as primarily a "Maintenance and optimization upgrade" by Rettig, Constantinople features small, yet highly technical, ethereum improvements to network efficiency and fee structure, as well as, upgrades that pave the way to ethereum's hotly anticipated scaling roadmap.

The hard fork includes changes to ethereum's underlying economic policy, and the delay of the difficulty bomb, a piece of code programmed to activate what is known as the ethereum "Ice age" in which new block creation on the network eventually slows to a complete halt.

EIP 145: A technical upgrade written by two ethereum developers, Alex Beregszaszi and Pawel Bylica, EIP 145 details a more efficient method of information processing on ethereum known as bitwise shifting.

EIP 1014: Created by the founder of ethereum himself, Vitalik Buterin, the purpose of this upgrade is to better facilitate a certain type of scaling solution based upon state channels and "Off-chain" transactions.

EIP 1234: Championed by Afri Schoedon, release manager for major ethereum client Parity, this upgrade is the most contentious of the batch, reducing block mining reward issuance from 3 ETH down to 2 ETH, as well as, delaying the difficulty bomb for a period of 12 months.

Further EIPs deal with how smart contracts are stored on ethereum - such as EIP 1283, which reduces the amount developers need to pay when building smart contracts.

Actively under development as a part of efforts to scale ethereum for larger transaction volume, these channels minimize the amount of operations that need to happen on the ethereum blockchain itself, freeing up network resources and space.

In summary, all five EIPs have impacts to ethereum that touch on a number of broader goals and initiatives still to be worked out on the decentralized platform even after Constantinople is fully released.

Luckily, the sneak peak of all five EIPs to be included in Constantinople has given ethereum fans and critics alike a good sense on what to expect.