Binance Prepares to Support Ethereum’s Constantinople Hard Fork

The Ethereum upgrade, expected around January 16, will implement five Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs).

Binance, one of the leading crypto exchanges, has announced support for the upcoming Constantinople hard fork of Ethereum (ETH). The upgrade, which is not contentious and will be accepted by all miners and nodes immediately, will happen at block height 7,080,000, most probably around January 16.

Binance will take care of all technical issues for users, and those holding coins and tokens on the exchange will not need to upgrade anything. Binance also reached out to Ethereum-based projects to discuss any airdrops or additional hard forks dependent on the Ethereum network.

The Constantinople hard fork will not do away with mining but will decrease the block reward once again while diffusing the “difficulty time bomb” for another period. Until the Casper update, and possibly afterward, Ethereum will still depend on partial mining, as well as various forms of staking.

Other proposals aim to improve the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) to decrease gas usage, as well as implement a new form of gas measuring to achieve more efficient pricing.

The news of the upgrade was one of the factors that boosted ETH market prices in the past month, with the asset growing by more than 80% from recent lows. It reached $156.50, posting gains of more than 30% in the past week.

Ethereum has sparked both negative and positive opinions over time, but it remains an integral part of the crypto ecosystem. While networks using forms of staking and delegation are faster, Ethereum still carries the most tokens and remains popular. Competitors like EOS or Tezos do not always manage to take away users and developers from the Ethereum community, relying instead on their own supporters.

Along with Binance, the Bitbox exchange has also signaled its readiness to support the hard fork and all the upgrades.

The Ethereum network continues to carry roughly 550,000 transactions per day, a much smaller count compared to distributed proof-of-stake networks. However, the traffic on DPoS networks is suspected of spam or fake transactions, while that on Ethereum is relatively transparent.

The biggest weakness of Ethereum is that the distributed apps on the network are still too complex for users and typically see only a few hundred visitors a day.