Ethereum Wallet Downtime on Coins.ph During Constantinople Upgrade

February 28, 2019 – The planned Ethereum Constantinople hard fork will finally happen on March 1st, and several websites and applications supporting Ethereum, including Philippine-based Coins.ph issued announcements on how they will handle the hard fork.

Constantinople is the 2-part upgrade to Ethereum and will occur on block 7,280,000. The hard fork will implement a number of improvement proposals that can solve issues related to ethereum’s speed, cost, and even miner issues. “Constantinople” is a step towards “Serenity”, which, when achieved, will be the true affirmation of one of the world’s largest public blockchain.

Constantinople

The upgrades happening on March 1st are called “Constantinople” and “St. Petersburg”. In Constantinople, the following improvements will be implemented:

• EIP 145 will add native functionality to protocol that is cheaper and easier to do certain things on the chain.
• EIP 1014 will allow interaction with addresses that have yet to be created.
• EIP 1052 will make it cheaper (less gas needed) to do certain things on the chain
• EIP 1234 will make sure the blockchain will not freeze before proof of stake is ready and implemented.

St. Petersburg

Test networks were upgraded last January to test the original Constantinople fork. There, it was discovered that an improvement proposal – EIP 1283 – is vulnerable for reentrancy attacks. So St. Petersburg will remove EIP 1283 on those test networks.

What Shall I do as en Ethereum User / ETH Holder?

Nothing. The Ethereum blog notes that anyone using exchanges, web wallets, mobile wallets, or hardware wallets to store their ethers do not need to do anything unless they are informed to take additional steps.

Coins.ph Downtime for Ethereum Wallet

In the Philippines, Coins.ph announced it is halting ETH wallet activity on March 1, 2019 from 1:oo am to 4:00 am PH time so that it can take care of any technical requirements and monitor developments closely. Wallet activities include sending, receiving, and converting of ETH on Coins.ph and Coins Pro.

Other Exchanges

A number of exchanges, including Binance, Coinbase, and Kraken have confirmed support for Ethereum’s upgrade.

No New Token Expected

Unlike the Bitcoin Cash split that happened with Bitcoin, the upcoming Ethereum upgrade appears to have strong support from the Ethereum Community. Hence, it is not expected that a new coin will be created from the fork.

This article originally appeared on BitPinas: Ethereum Wallet Downtime on Coins.ph During Constantinople Upgrade