Parity Implements Constantinople Ahead Of Ethereum Hard Fork

September 11, 2018 7:37 PM

Parity has officially implemented Constantinople to its client software and is ready for testing ahead of Ethereum’s October hard fork. Afri Schoedon of Parity Technologies posted a link to the GitHub pull request on his Twitter feed today and was met with positive feedback from the Twitter and reddit spheres.

However, some in the Ethereum community still appear upset about the core developers’ acceptance of EIP 1234 to reduce issuance to 2 Ether, and the associated failure to immediately accept ProgPOW. ProgPOW is a consensus algorithm that attempts to eliminate the advantage of certain high-tech mining rigs, called ASICs, to increase competition and miner participation. Amid declining Ether prices, some in the community find this concern particularly urgent. However, the developers appear decidedly less worried.

Implementation means that the EIPs have been merged with Parity’s code, but until further testing it is unclear whether there will be any last-minute bugs to work out.

EIPs included in the upcoming hard fork are EIP 1234, EIP 145, EIP 1014, EIP 1052, and EIP 1283.

EIP 145, proposed by developers Alex Beregszaszi and Paweł Bylica, specifies Bitwise shifting instructions in the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). This measure will dramatically decrease gas prices for certain arithmetic operations.

EIP 1014, called Skinny CREATE2, was proposed by Vitalik Buterin and adds a new opcode that allows for improved performance of state channels.

EIP 1052, proposed by Nick Johnson and Bylica, also specifies a new opcode, EXTCODEHASH, which is designed to reduce gas costs and increase code efficiency in certain cases, particularly when one contract performs checks on another contract’s bytecode.

EIP 1283, authored by Wei Tang, is a replacement to the earlier EIP 1087 and specifies net gas metering for SSTORE without dirty maps. This is another EIP to increase efficiency and reduce gas costs.

Other clients expected to implement Constantinople include Geth, Trinity, cpp-ethereum, EthereumJ/Harmony, and Aleth/Cpp-Ethereum. (Interested readers can visit the progress tracker here, but it is not always entirely up to date.) The better way to track implementation status is to access each client’s GitHub, which can be found through the progress tracker.

Parity’s work will likely be discussed at the core devs meeting this Friday, September 14 at 7 a.m. PDT, notes of which can be found on Github, generally within a couple hours of the call. Friday’s call will focus on testing, client updates, research updates, and Constantinople.

Alison is an editor and occasional writer for ETHNews. She has a Master’s in English from the University of Wyoming. She lives in Reno with her pooch and a cat she half likes. Her favorite things to do include binge listening to podcasts, getting her chuckles via dog memes, and spending as much time outside as possible.

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