Hong Kong-based digital asset exchange OKEx, and Singapore-headquartered crypto exchange Huobi Global will be supporting the upcoming ethereum (ETH) Constantinople hard fork upgrade.
As CryptoGlobe reported in December 2018, Ethereum’s development team said that Constantinople would go live between January 14 and 18. Consisting of five different ethereum improvement proposals (EIPs), the Constantinople update will reduce miner rewards from 3 ETH to 2 ETH, and make other fundamental changes to the network’s codebase – which are aimed at improving the overall efficiency of the Ethereum blockchain.
In a press release shared with Cointelegraph, OKEx’s management team noted that the exchange would be taking a snapshot of all its accounts at block height 7,080,000, the point at which Ethereum’s developers have decided to activate Constantinople. OKEx has asked all its customers to deposit their ETH tokens on the exchange’s trading platform as it will manage the technical requirements for Ethereum’s network upgrade.
Handling All Technical Requirements
Huobi will also support the Constantinople update as the cryptoasset exchange operator has advised its clients to deposit their ETH holdings onto its platform. Similar to OKEx, Huobi’s team will be managing all technical issues related to Ethereum’s hard fork.
As the world’s first smart contract-enabled decentralized application (dApp) development platform, Ethereum’s Constantinople upgrade is aimed at helping it gradually transition from the current proof-of-work (PoW)-based consensus system to a proof-of-stake (PoS)-based network management protocol.
Once the backwards-incompatible Constantinople upgrade has been activated, the Ethereum network’s transaction validating nodes will all have to update synchronically with the cryptocurrency platform’s blockchain. Notably, Ethereum’s core developers are also considering using a new type of proof-of-work (PoW) algorithm called “ProgPoW” which is designed to improve the efficiency of GPU-based mining on the network.
Replacing Ethereum’s Current PoW
As a standalone (independent) and system-wide update, programmatic PoW has been designed to prevent ether miners from using specialized mining hardware such as high-end ASICs. This should give all the network’s participants an equal opportunity to mine blocks . During the next bi-weekly meeting (on January 18) between Ethereum’s developers, the team might announce if/when they will be activating ProgPoW.
As CryptoGlobe reported on January 3, Malta-based crypto exchange Binance has announced it will be supporting Ethereum’s Constantinople update. Via an announcement on its official Binance website, the cryptocurrrency exchange stated it will be handling “all technical requirements” related to the hard fork . Although it likely won’t happen, there’s still a possibility that a group of network validators could choose not to support Constantinople. This would result in two separate blockchain networks and coins (after the fork).
No Visible Changes To End Users
If there’s a chain split and/or airdrops are conducted during the hard fork, Binance has requested projects to contact its support team in order to discuss how to manage the process. Presumably, the exchange company might look into whether it’ll list any new tokens created, and how it may safely conduct airdrops
As noted by Ethereum’s core developers, the Constantinople hard fork will not feature many visible changes for end users. It’s reportedly a “maintenance and optimization upgrade” aimed at changing Ethereum’s economic policy while also postponing its difficulty bomb, which will activate its “Ice Age.”
Ethereum’s native token ether (ETH) is up 0.71% in the past 24 hours and is currently trading at $157.52, according to CryptoCompare data. The cryptocurrency’s price has surged over 80% after recording a low of $82 in December 2018.
