Ethereum (ETH) lethargic ahead of Constantinople upgrade

Cryptocurrency markets are pretty quiet at the beginning of the year. Experts believe that traders and investors are sitting on the fence ahead of major Ethereum network update. The new protocol release also known as Constantinople upgrade is scheduled on January 16. Basically, Constantinople is also a hard fork. Though, unlike the recent debacle with Bitcoin Cash that led to a messy hard fork, Ethereum community has no discrepancies about the upcoming changes. However, it may still lead to a period of uncertainty and poses some risks for active traders.

“In this upcoming case, the Ethereum upgrade has been widely embraced by the community and until now there have been no major players protesting Constantinople (the name of the upgrade). So most likely it will be a smooth upgrade. This means that the entire network will probably implement the upgrade together and there will be no action required from the end users,” according to Mati Greenspan, a senior market analyst at eToro.

Read more about the upcoming Constantinople ungrade

The fork will take place at block number 7,080,000, which means that all client applications with full node support shall be upgraded by that time and run the new version of the protocol to avoid multiple forks.

ETH/USD is changing hands at $154.92, down the recent high reached at $163.74. The coin is capped by DMA100 currently at $164.62 and it is unlikely to be taken out before the hard work takes place. The local support is created by $150.00 and followed by DMA50 at $120.55