“Cautious optimism.” That’s how Hudson Jameson, developer relations for the Ethereum Foundation, described the mood in the run-up to ethereum’s fifth planned system-wide upgrade, Constantinople. Expected to activate next Wednesday, Jan. 16, Constantinople is a type of upgrade known as a hard fork – which means it needs to be unilaterally installed across all nodes in the network to function as intended. This approach is a process that comes with inherent risks. For example, if a sufficient number of users don’t agree with an upgrade, it could cause the network to split. Such an event took place in 2016 when a ... (full story)