GoChain Support for Ethereum’s Constantinople Upgrade

UPDATE — FEB. 25: Due to Ethereum’s last second delays of Constantinople hard fork, we’ve decided to give a week of extra time before GoChain forks, just in case. You can find the latest details and exact times in this post.

We’ll go through each improvement proposal (EIP) that is going into Constantinople and let you know what GoChain is going to support. MyCrypto has a great overview of the changes in this post if you want more details.

GoChain will support these changes the same day they go into effect on Ethereum.

EIP 145: Bitwise shifting instructions in EVM

The name says it all. GoChain will fully support EIP-145.

EIP 1014: Skinny CREATE2

Interact with contracts that don’t exist yet… so meta. Good for sidechains and state channels. GoChain will fully support EIP-1014.

EIP 1052: EXTCODEHASH opcode

Returns keccak256 hash of a contract’s code. Previously you had to copy the entire code with EXTCODECOPY and compute the hash. Now you can just get the hash without the code, making it a much cheaper operation. GoChain will fully support EIP-1052.

EIP 1283: Net gas metering for SSTORE without dirty maps

A security issue with EIP-1283 is the reason the Ethereum fork was delayed and this will no longer be included in the Constantinople upgrade, therefore GoChain will also not include it.

EIP 1234: Constantinople Difficulty Bomb Delay and Block Reward Adjustment

This is delaying the Ethereum difficulty bomb for 12 months which would have increased block times beyond 15 seconds (the current average block time) and reduces the block rewards for Ethereum miners. GoChain will not support EIP-1234 because:

• GoChain’s average block time is already 5 seconds (with plans to reduce even further soon)
• GoChain does not use Proof of Work so there is no way to have a difficulty bomb
• GoChain will not reduce rewards for signers at this point in time, but will at some point in the future

EIP-1234 is very Ethereum specific and doesn’t apply to GoChain.

Conclusion

GoChain will still be 100% compatible after the fork, all the tools and smart contracts you are using will work exactly the same on GoChain as they do on Ethereum.