Ethereum to Release Its Constantinople and St. Petersburg Updates Ahead This Week

Last Friday, February 22, the official blog post for Ethereum noted that the network is scheduled to bring two new updates named Constantinople and St. Petersburg, this week ahead on Thursday, February 28.

The blog post notes that the updates will take place on the block number 7,280,000, however, considering the unpredictability of the mining activity, the implementation might happen either prior to or after the scheduled date.

The official announcement notes that despite these are two separate updates, they shall be implemented simultaneously combined into a single event. The Constantinople upgrade will feature a number of important changes and improvements like delaying the “difficulty bomb” and reducing the Ethereum block reward.

As the Ethereum network plans to move over the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) algorithm, the difficulty bomb would ensure to prevent miners from continuing their activity. However, the PoS implementation is currently postponed and so the developers decided to delay the difficulty bomb to “make sure we don’t freeze the blockchain before proof of stake is ready & implemented”.

Earlier scheduled to occur in January 2019, the Constantinople hard fork was delayed after a potential bug was discovered in its software. The bug was severe to the extent that it would allow attackers to exploit the Constantinople code and continuously withdraw user funds.

To help Ethereum spearhead with its PoS implementation, blockchain startup CasperLabs is creating a new blockchain based on a version of Proof-of-Stake (PoS).

Vlad Zamfir, a researcher at Ethereum Foundation will serve as the lead consensus protocol architect. CasperLabs will sponsor most of Zamfir’s work on PoS research to deploy a “fully decentralized, sharded and scalable next-generation blockchain.”

Zamfir task would be to develop “protocol specifications” and support the CasperLabs team in development of the new technology. However, his role would be strictly limited as a researchers and he won’t be doing any coding task himself.

Also, for the implementation of PoS, there are different computing designs, however, the one proposed by Zamfir is referred to as Casper Correct by Construction (CBC). According to details, “[Casper CBC] promises to scale the blockchain without sacrificing decentralization … By removing the mining required by traditional proof-of-work protocols, it will be more ecologically and economically efficient and secure than pre-existing [blockchain] systems.”

Zamfir praised the efforts of CasperLabs saying: “I’m excited that CasperLabs has taken an interest in implementing a scalable blockchain protocol from the CBC Casper family of protocols, and hope that their efforts are both independently successful and put pressure on other projects – like Ethereum – to adopt the technology.”