What is the Ethereum Constantinople Update?

The Constantinople update is a major update coming to the Ethereum network which addresses issues relating to the overall performance of the network and the difficulty bomb. As the update is very intensive this will result in a break in backward compatibility thus leading to a hard fork. But unlike the previous hard fork dramas, this will not split ethereum into two!

Performance Improvements

As ethereum is facing competition from other competitors like Eos, Nem and Neo, the developers are implementing some improvements to the Ethereum Virtual Machine through Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP’s). EIP’s can be proposed by anyone in the community and can be submitted for review and if a majority of people agrees with the proposal it gets accepted and will be implemented. In this Constantinople update 5 EIP’s are being implemented:

EIP 145 -Bitwise Shift Instructions

This EIP brings in bitwise shifting instructions to the EVM. These are operations which move bits of a number to the left or right. These instructions help in reducing gas to almost 10 times and this would result in running smart contracts cheaper.

EIP 1052 — EXTCODEHASH Opcode

Smart contracts often need to check the bytecode of other contracts but do not necessarily need the bytecode itself in various scenarios. This is presently carried out by the EXTCODECOPY opcode which is very expensive in cases of large contracts. As a result, EIP 1052 proposes a new opcode EXTCODEHASH which returns the keccak256 hash of a contract’s bytecode which is a lot more efficient and cost-effective.

EIP 1014 -State Channels

This EIP brings in the concept of state channels to the ethereum network. This allows settling of transactions off chain analogous to the lightning network in the bitcoin network. This EIP itself can bring a dramatic change in the throughput of the ethereum network thus achieving higher transactions per second.

EIP 1283 -Net gas metering for SSTORE

This EIP proposes a way for gas metering on SSTORE (as an alternative for EIP-1087 and EIP-1153), using information that is more universally available to most implementations, and require as little change in implementation structures as possible. This in effect introduces a more equitable pricing method for changes made to data storage which in turn benefits the smart contract developers.

EIP 1234 -Reduce block reward & delay the difficulty bomb

This EIP brings in two major proposals, one is the reduction of block reward from 3 Eth to 2 Eth so as to reduce the supply and to bring in scarcity. This is set in a balance so as to reduce inflation and also not to disincentivize the miners as they keep the network secure.

Difficulty bomb is a special mechanism introduced by the developers so as to prevent the miners from not switching to the proof of stake enabled ethereum network(Casper) as the bomb will exponentially increase the difficulty of mining thus disincentivizing the miners. This also puts pressure on the developers as they need to put up the Casper update before the ice age caused by the difficulty bomb. But developers do not want to rush the update as they need to make it 100% safe before deploying and so this EIP also delays the difficulty bomb by 12 months.

So these are the major improvements that would be brought to the table by the Constantinople update and through all these updates Ethereum plans to scale hugely and increase its throughput.