Ethereum Constantinople Hard Fork is in just two days with the official fork date being the 16th of January 2019. This fork is sure considered to be a major event not only for those into Ethereum network but also for the crypto community generally. ChangeNOW, a leading non-custodial cryptocurrency exchange, is getting ready for the upgrade together with Ethereum community and is explaining the basics of Constantinople in the series of articles.First of all, it is important to talk about hard forks. We went through some tough ones recently — starting with the epic massacre of the Bitcoin Cash Hash War and ending with two of the supposed Ethereum chain splits actually robbing the users.Well, no matter what happens, it is not the reason to feel threatened. Hard forks are dramatic events in blockchain life, but they are surely necessary for future development.To start with the basics, a hard fork is a radical upgrade of a taken network that creates a literal fork (two versions of one blockchain) — one of the branches is running on a newer version and the other utilises the older. Usually, it happens that the nodes using the older version all gradually upgrade and the “old-school” chain dies out.Sometimes, though, a split happens and two coins are derived from the single blockchain (like it happened to Bitcoin Cash, for instance).Constantinople is not going to bring us more coins but will be the beginning of PoS transition and technical development of Ethereum network.
For more information on the upgrade, read ChangeNOW’s blog post on Ethereum Constantinople Hard Fork.