Ethereum Constantinople Soon ⏳

Ethereum hard fork is going to be around January 16. The forked blockchain will intergrate all of the Ethereum Improvement Proposals - EIPs of which five are being adopted:
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1. EIP 145 about bitwise shifting instructions to use less Gas.
2. EIP 1052 new smart contract code verification improvement, more efficient/cost effective.
3. EIP 1014 Layer 2 / off chain transactions, as Bitcoin’s lightning network, will greatly improve the performance of Ethereum.
4. EIP 1234 that reduces the block reward and delays the difficulty bomb, while Block time should stay at around 15 seconds.
5. EIP 1283 optimizing Gas usage on the network.