Ether Remained Stable After Reaching Constantinople
The ether price remains (UTC 05:50 AM) almost unchanged after the Ethereum platform has successfully activated the Constantinople and St. Petersburg network upgrades at block number 7,280,000 ten hours ago.
Ether price chart:
Meanwhile, history suggests that the price could drop following the hard fork, even though reducing the influx of new ether should drive up the price thanks to supply and demand laws.
With the upgrade, the Block Reward Reduction (aka the Thirdening) has been implemented – the reward for mining went down from 3 ETH to 2 ETH, in an effort to reduce the inflation of ether in basic supply and demand economics.
Later today, in a meeting at UTC 2 PM, Ethereum core developers will discuss the upgrade success among other questions.
The livestream can be found below:
The Constantinople: background
As explained in a post on the Ethereum blog, if you use an exchange (such as Coinbase, Kraken, or Binance), a web wallet service (such as Metamask, MyCrypto, or MyEtherWallet), a mobile wallet service (such as Coinbase Wallet, Status.im, or Trust Wallet), or a hardware wallet (such as Ledger, Trezor, or KeepKey you do not need to do anything in relation to the upgrade unless you are informed to take additional steps by your exchange or wallet service.
The Constantinople update has been delayed in January due to a discovered vulnerability. The vulnerability, featured in an Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) which was set to introduce cheaper gas costs for certain operations, has been subsequently removed from the list of EIPs that are implemented in the upgrade.
However, back in January, some nodes had already implemented Constantinople as it was, with the faulty EIP 1283. Now, Constantinople was issued in two parts simultaneously on the main network. The first upgrade included all five original EIPs and a second upgrade, called St. Petersburg, specifically removed EIP 1283. This way it is ensured that nodes that had already implemented Constantinople can fix the issue by removing EIP 1283 without rolling back any blocks.
Another significant EIP in this update is EIP 1234, which includes the Difficulty Bomb Delay. The Difficulty Bomb is a mechanism that, if activated, would increase the difficulty of mining a new block until it becomes impossible and no new blocks can be mined. This EIP postpones that for another twelve months, at which point it will be voted upon again. This would also incentivize people to move from the Proof of Work system that is currently used by Ethereum towards Proof of Stake, which is what the platform is aiming for.
