Gauging Community Expectations and Developer Readiness as Ethereum’s Constantinople Launch Date Approaches

On the long run, this is decidedly bullish. https://t.co/4bbgAHMz7Z

According to him, the 90 percent increase ETH experienced during the last month may be connected with the Constantinople hard fork. The ETH price spiked once the date for the upgrade release was announced, but later fell against the United States dollar.

Kruger also suggests that other Ethereum upgrades had a different effect on the price of the coin. Thus, it can be difficult to predict what will happen after Constantinople is released. According to Kruger, after the fork, Ethereum miners who spend more than $0.075 per unit on electricity will be operating at a loss in case the ETH price remains at about $155. However, there will still be those miners who may continue their activity even if this happens.

Arthur Hayes, CEO of cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX, hopes that ETH will revive when the ICO market comes back to life. Hayes believes that the ICO market will start to gain momentum once again in the near future and will have a great influence on ETH. He explained:

“The use case for Ether is primarily ICOs. That market is dead right now. Once there are new issues, then Ether will rebound aggressively. When the ICO market returns, Ether will quickly test $200. The timing of the ICO rebirth is 12 to 18 months out.”

What if the fork fails?

In general, judging by the table tracking Ethereum clients’ readiness to upgrade and coordinated work of developers, problems with consensus will probably be eliminated. All new versions of Ethereum clients have already received updates, which will automatically start working on Jan. 16. And users will automatically receive new ETH for use in the new network.

The security manager of the Ethereum Foundation, Martin Swende, noted that the new version of the go-ethereum client will contain a kind of “emergency switch” that will postpone the upgrade if the its release fails.

In general, the Ethereum Foundation team is positive and confident about everything regarding the readiness for the upcoming fork. “We are on track to have a successful network upgrade,” Hudson Jameson emphasized.

Additionally, the developers have provided a whole road map for the subsequent protocol upgrade, which will allow planning and tracking of all the iterations necessary so that the transition to PoS is completed on time.  

Last call

The crypto space is awaiting the first — and one of the largest — forks of 2019. While the investors’ eyes are fixed upon ETH rates, and the developers are finalizing all the iterations to be prepared for a smooth upgrade, the share of nodes ready for the switch remains small. Though Afri Schoedon assumes an overall upgrade rate is about 44 percent, according to the current statistics provided by Ethernodes, only 15.8 percent of all Ethereum clients have upgraded to the latest version, despite there being only one week left.

Despite the fact that the developers haven’t announced any possible forks, the appearance of new coins and airdrops cannot be excluded. As demonstrated by 2018’s Bitcoin Cash (BCH) fork, things may change at the last second.