Ethereum is embracing the Constantinople milestone at the end of November 2018, after DevCon4 in Prague. Constantinople is the latest Ethereum release, introduced through a hard fork, that will include five Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs):Bitwise shifting instructions (EIP 145) in the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) allow for direct manipulation of bytes on the EVM layer.Skinny CREATE2 (EIP 1014) adds a new opcode that creates a contract but determines the deployed address differently to the existing CREATE opcode.The EXTCODEHASH opcode (EIP 1052) adds an opcode which returns the keccak256 hash of a contact’s byte code.Net gas metering for SSTORE (EIP 1283) introduces a new gas cost scheme for the SSTORE opcode.The difficulty bomb delay (EIP 1234) stabilizes block times and issuance by keeping block times at approximately 15 seconds for another 12 months and reducing block rewards to 2 ETH.To the regular application user, these updates offer nothing noticeably different, except perhaps an update to their Ethereum clients. For developers, these EIPs provide extended capabilities to the EVM, allowing for improved flexibility for smart contract development. All of these changes are backward compatible, ensuring previously deployed smart contracts remain usable and secure.This hard fork does not address scalability yet. Layer 1 scaling solutions, such as sharding + casper or Shasper, are still in the r...
