An upgrade to the ETH (Ethereum) Constantinople is moving ahead as scheduled. On December 11th, new code was published to the software client on GitHub that includes a new Constantinople activation time. According to the post, Geth (Go Ethereum v1.8.20) is an important release that will permit the Constantinople hard fork at block 7,080,000 on the Ethereum mainnet. Geth is part of three unique executions of the Ethereum protocol. This is also expected to be the last scheduled release for the 1.8 collection. Ethereum will merge backward-incompatible changes onto the master in order to prepare for Geth 1.9.0. On December 7th, core developers of Ethereum launched Constantinople hard fork at block 7,080,000. It is comprised of 5 separate EIPs, or Ethereum Improvement Proposals, to help make the transition from PoW (proof-of-work) to the energy-efficient PoS (proof-of-stake) consensus algorithm a smooth one. PoS is expected to change the Ethereum blockchain fundamentally through a lot of new upgrades that will prevent future backward compatibility. Nodes will either need to run as a separate blockchain entity or synchronically update with the whole system. The December 7th agreement followed a previous decision to postpone the Constantinople hard fork until the end of January because of an issue that showed up during a trial upgrade of the Ropsten testnet back in October. Recently Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, had a lot to say about these new developments. He believes that blockchains that include sharding based on PoS will be much more efficient. He also believes that the user experience will improve as fees are driven down (advances in scalability). The most important part of the story will then become non-financial applications. He goes on to say that blockchains are not intended to cut computational costs but to decrease social costs through increasing computational costs.