On February 28, the Constantinople hard fork took place at block #7280000 on the network of the second-largest by capitalization cryptocurrency Ethereum. Simultaneously with Constantinople, the St. Petersburg hard fork was activated on the Ethereum network. Its task is to disable the EIP-1283 protocol, in which problems with a Reentrancy-type vulnerability were discovered. It was precisely because of these that the upgrade was canceled in January.

At the moment, approximately 19.9% of the total number of Geth clients are using the new version of the software. The Constantinople-compatible version of the software was also installed by 32.6% of Parity clients. Overall readiness for the hard fork was 22.1%. As reported, the protocol update went smoothly, without any surprises.

The daily emission volume will now be at the level of 13400 ETH, the mining time for one block will be 14 seconds, and the reward for it will be reduced from 3 to 2 ETH (EIP 1234). The Ethereum inflation rate will be about 4%.

Constantinople is the second stage of the Metropolis hard fork (the first was Byzantium, which reduced the block reward from 5 to 3 ETH). Among the other changes in the Ethereum network, the following can be noted:

— EIP 145 — increasing the efficiency and speed of the blockchain by adding Bitwise switching mechanisms to the Ethereum virtual machine;
— EIP 1014 — focused on further scaling of Ethereum — through transactions outside the main chain;
— EIP 1052 — improving the usability of the network for developing smart contracts and simplifying certain operations in the Ethereum code, improves smart contracts and allows them to verify one another using a hash;
— EIP 1234 — reduces the block reward and postpones the difficulty bomb by a year. Postponing the difficulty bomb will return the block mining time to its normal levels. In February, the block time grew to 20 seconds, but now it will drop to 14.5 seconds;
— EIP 1283 — makes transactions cheaper and reduces the cost of gas for SSTORE operations.

Among other things, the update optimizes the use of gas in the network and creates the conditions for the activation of the Casper protocol, which will transition Ethereum to the hybrid PoW/PoS consensus algorithm. Constantinople is another step toward Ethereum 2.0 and the long-awaited transition to Proof of Stake.

The activation of Constantinople was supposed to take place back in the autumn of last year, however, each time on the eve of the protocol update the developers found various bugs. The final activation date was agreed upon on January 18.