Ethereum Hard Fork and Its Effect on Price


It seems that Ethereum will make a quick start to 2019 as it will have 3 major hard forks in this month of January. Information about these hard forks is contained in this article.

January 2, 2019 | AtoZ MarketsWord on the street is that the much-awaited Ethereum (ETH) hard forks will happen this month of January 2019 and as most analysts predict, they are expected to give a massive boost to the price of ETHUSD. Out of these upcoming new hard forks, 3 are most significant.

  1. Ethereum Nowa Fork: On January 12, 2019, each ETH holder will receive Ethereum Nowa (ETN) free of charge in a ratio of 1: 1, as the initial total supply is about 136 million ETN.
  2. Classic Vision hard Fork: Slated for January 11, 2019, each Ethereum holder will receive 3 ETCVs for each ETH they have in their wallets.
  3. Constantinople Fork: As announced by the developers on Twitter, Ethereum’s Constantinople will happen Jan 16, 2019 at 7 AM UTC, and the block in which that hard fork will take place is 7,080,000.

The Constantinople Mainnet is a controversial hard fork and the most significant fork considering the fact that its purpose is to make the transition from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS). As per the developers, the Constantinople Fork would “usher in a new wave of distributed ledger technologies”.  

This hard fork would be more effective as it will reduce miner’s rewards to 2 ETH instead of 3 ETH and also decrease the block time, thus making the network faster and less expensive.

Initially scheduled to deploy in November 2018, Ethereum Constantinople failed when deployed on the testnet in October 2018. Following the failure on testnet, the development team, Afri Shchoedon came to a consensus with the miners that a fork was unlikely in 2018.

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What do all of these forks mean for the stability of the Ethereum network and the price of the ETH? 

Ethereum Blockchain, which is the third largest cryptocurrency in terms of market value, is now facing stiffer competition with Blockchains like EOS, Cardano (ADA), Zilliqa (ZIL) and several others during the past few months of 2018.

Whilst these Blockchains have seen their currencies lost almost 90 percent of their value in 2018, this does not undermine the fact that hard forks tend to weaken the overall support of a Blockchain network, especially when developers start to take sides and then migrate from the old chain to work on the newer chains that form. 

We saw this in the case of Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash hard forks (now BCHABC and BCHSV after BCH). After the birth of BCH, many people thought it could compete in the crypto space and that one day it could surpass BTC. However, after going to the fragmented BCH hard fork, very few a people started giving it the chance.

For the Ethereum price, it's generally hard to predict long-term hard fork. Nevertheless, we can expect to see huge volatility in the short term because investors will be ready to migrate to the side of the new coins from these upcoming hard forks. When it was hard fork in Bitcoin (when BCH was born), the price of BTC declined from $2,800 to $2,700 in July 2018.

All eyes on the upcoming Ethereum Constantinople hard fork

This points to good news for the new crypto coins that will soon emerge in the Ethereum hard forks, however, it doesn't help Ethereum in the recovery of the number 2 position XRP has received in the second half of 2018. The Constantinople fork, on the other hand, helps ETH pass to the PoS, is perceived as an important milestone enough to give a short-term bullish sentiment.

While it is difficult to determine exactly how the series of ethereum forks will impact the network or price in the short and long term, it is noteworthy that Ether, at the moment, is in the middle of a critical transition phase that could determine whether or not it will remain the most dominant blockchain for Dapps in the months to come.

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