In an announcement today, Binance has confirmed that they are going to support the upcoming Ethereum Constantinople Hard Fork.

Binance Will Support the Upcoming Ethereum Constantinople Hard Forkhttps://t.co/Jt91lT7hdY pic.twitter.com/OTr8fNOLr8

— Binance (@binance) January 3, 2019

The leading crypto exchange has requested its users to leave sufficient time for deposits to be processed in full prior to the block height of 7,080,000. They expect the estimated time of fork to be between 14th and 18th of this month. Constantinople will reduce the block rewards from 3 to 2, decreasing new $ETH supply accordingly.

If there are any other hard forks or airdrops during the Constantinople hard fork period, Binance has invited these respective project teams to contact us at [email protected] for further discussion.

The Constantinople hard fork is the second part of the ‘Metropolis’ Ethereum development stage, and involves implementing a number of Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) to make transitioning Ethereum from a Proof-of-Work blockchain over to a Proof-of-Stake blockchain smoother and much easier.

Some of these changes include reducing the ETH block reward – stripping it down from 3 ETH to 2 ETH – as well as delaying the difficulty bomb by 12 months in a bid to gradually phase out ETH mining (EIP 1234). Other EIPs include changes to facilitate off-chain scaling solutions (1014), optimizing large-scale code execution (1052) and revising the gas cost scheme for the SSTORE opcode (1238).

In the anticipation of the upcoming hardfork the Ethereum price is rising. Ripple overtook Ethereum in recent months but the Ethereum market has managed to claw back some of the losses. It now sits only $70 million behind Ripple in market cap, at the time of writing, as Ethereum currently holds a market cap value of $14.72 billion and Ripple holds $14.79 billion.

Analysts anticipate that before the upcoming hardfork, Ethereum will reclaim the spot of the biggest altcoin.

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